Evolution,science and the study of literature: A critical response

Abstract

This article offers a critical response to the proposal made by Jonathan Gottschall (2008), and discussed sympathetically in a review article for this journal (Francis 2010), for a more ‘scientific’ approach to the study of literature. A critical examination of evolutionary psychology, the particular scientific approach which underpins Gottschall’s own work on folk tales, is followed by a broader consideration of what ‘scientific’ might mean in relation to literature, asking how far it is either possible or desirable to apply the methods and evaluative metrics of science in other areas of scholarly endeavour. It is argued that there are good reasons for linguists and literary scholars to maintain the theoretical and methodological pluralism that has characterized their fields in the past