Toward a sociobiological hermeneutic

This interdisciplinary, innovative, and intellectually challenging volume draws on post-Darwinian advances in scientific disciplines to reanalyze canonical works of literature. This approach to literary criticism understands cultural artifacts to be evolutionarily fostered products of attendant environments, intrinsically respects literature as a whole, and forsakes the chronological ordering that drives many critical studies. Works by Wilde, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Boccaccio stand alongside novels from Dreiser, Dos Passos, Larsen, and Faulkner in a selection of primary texts that eschews historical and geographical parochialism. The hermeneutical advances deployed throughout the book also interact with other literary theories, including structuralism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. This range of material and perspectives makes Toward a Sociobiological Hermeneutic pertinent to undergraduates, postgraduates, and academics alike, although methodological evolution throughout the volume means that the final two chapters are more suited to a postgraduate and scholarly readership. All primary analyses concern texts that regularly appear on literature courses offered by universities in America, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, and Anglophone Africa.