Literary Darwinism

New literary theory. From NY Times Magazine:

Just as Charles Darwin studied animals to discover the patterns behind their development, Literary Darwinists read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it's impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts.

From "Seed" interview of Jonathan Gottschall,

What did you find when you started reading literature through this new lens?
The Iliad was particularly significant for me because I was reading it while also reading Morris and other texts on sociobiology. As a result, Homer's evolutionary themes were jumping off the page. Right away I was seeing the drama of naked apes competing for social status and material resources; as well, they were competing directly and indirectly over women...You know, Einstein once said that theory defines what we can see. If Literary Darwinism has anything going for it we should start to see things in literature that weren't seen before, or seen as crisply before. I say this because I feel that I saw things in Homer that even 2,600 years worth of Homer scholars hadn't seen.

Do you expand on these insights in your forthcoming book, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge, est. 2006)?

Yes, I use an evolutionary lens to flip conventional commentary on Homeric disputes. Instead of suggesting that winning women is merely a proximate goal masking competition for wealth, power and prestige, an evolutionary perspective suggests that honor, political power and social dominance are the proximate routes to the ultimate goal of women--for Homer's heroes and for ordinary men.