From the publisher: "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.'" With dual forewords by the literary critic Frederick Crews and the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson.