In recent years, articles in major periodicals from the "New York Times Magazine" to the "Times Literary Supplement" have heralded the arrival of a new school of literary studies that promises-or threatens-to profoundly shift the current paradigm. This revolutionary approach, known as Darwinian literary studies, is based on a few simple premises: evolution has produced a universal landscape of the human mind that can be scientifically mapped; these universal tendencies are reflected in the composition, reception, and interpretation of literary works; and an understanding of the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, psychology, and culture will enable literary scholars to gain powerful new perspectives on the elements, form, and nature of storytelling.
The goal of this book is to overcome some of the widespread misunderstandings about the meaning of a Darwinian approach to the human mind generally, and literature specifically. The volume brings together scholars from the forefront of the new field of evolutionary literary analysis-both literary analysts who have made evolution their explanatory framework and evolutionist scientists who have taken a serious interest in literature-to show how the human propensity for literature and art can be properly framed as a true evolutionary problem. Their work is an important step toward the long-prophesied synthesis of the humanities and what Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human nature."

In this devastatingly funny classic, Frederick Crews skewers the ego-inflated pretensions of the schools and practitioners of literary criticism popular in the 1960s, including Freudians, Aristotelians, and New Critics. Modelled on the "case-books" often used in freshman English classes at the time, "The Pooh Perplex" contains 12 essays written in different critical voices, complete with ridiculous footnotes, tongue-in-cheek "questions and study projects" and hilarious biographical notes on the contributors. With incisive essays such as "A Bourgeois Writer's Proletarian Fables" and "A la recherche du Pooh perdu", by distinguished authors such as Duns C. Penwiper and P.R. Honeycomb, "The Pooh Perplex" is sure to delight everyone who has ever had to suffer through a freshman English class - and many of their teachers, too. This edition contains a new preface by the author that compares literary theory then and now and identifies the real-life critics who were spoofed in certain chapters.