Joseph Carroll

Joseph Carroll (born 1949) is a scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and is now Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Publications and research After monographs on Matthew Arnold (1982) and Wallace Stevens (1987), Carroll's publications have centered on situating literary study within the evolutionary human sciences. His Evolution and Literary Theory (1995) was the first book in literary theory that assimilated ideas from evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, sociobiology, human ethology, and evolutionary epistemology. He argued that evolutionary literary theory offered a viable alternative both to post-structuralism and to traditional humanism. In the essays collected in Literary Darwinism (2004), Carroll worked toward building a comprehensive model of human nature, gave examples of evolutionary literary criticism, and criticized post-structuralism, traditional humanism, ecocriticism, cognitive poetics, and a narrow form of evolutionary psychology. In the essays collected in Reading Human Nature (2011), Carroll examined the adaptive function of literature and the other arts, offered Darwinian interpretations of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wuthering Heights, and Hamlet, gave examples of quantitative literary analysis, and reflected on the course of intellectual history from Charles Darwin to the present.