Evolution

For more than two millennia, literary scholars and critics have used intuitive folk psychology to characterize the motives and tonal qualities in individual literary works and literary genres. Evolutionary research on motives and emotions can now improve significantly on the insights available to folk psychology. It can provide scientifically valid categories for analyzing the subjects depicted in literature and the emotional configurations that make them meaningful. The dozens of emotions identified in empirical research can be organized and explained by an evolutionary understanding of human motives, developmental phases, neurological systems, and specifically human forms of cognitive and social development. This chapter organizes emotions in eight categories and uses those categories to outline several sets of genres characterized by the emotions they contain and evoke. Commentary on Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” illustrates the interaction of emotions in characters, authors, and readers.