Literature And Human Nature: From The View Of Evolutionary Psychology

There are many reasons to believe that connecting literary analysis with evolutionary psychology is an idea whose time has come. The biggest contribution of evolutionary psychology, regardless of which of its theories one accepts, is creating new fields of study for aspects of mental life. Literature, as a very important human spiritual phenomena, had been almost entirely neglected by academic psychology. Evolutionary psychology which based on Darwinian evolution attempts to explore new theory and method in this field.Geoffrey Miller maintains the display hypothesis, that is art originates in the context of courtship. Act is the costly neural signal of artists' adaptation, as well as the "peacock effect" of recognition. Steven Pinker holds by-product hypothesis of art, as "butter cake" meet the need of sweet, humans have evolved specific cognitive preferences, arts can satisfy the cognitive preference. Ellen Dissanayake, and Brian Boyd adhere to the idea of art as adaptation. Ellen Dissanayake points out that art comes from close contact between mum and child. Brian Boyd insists that art generate in the development of attention. However, the definition of art of these are too broad to have the universality of various forms. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides propose literature as organizational model of the brain through the study of fiction. Is literature an adaptation (a product of Darwinian natural selection), or a by-product of adaptations (sometimes called "spandrels"), or the result of genetic drift or other random evolutionary processes? With analysis of these three major theories, and the evidence of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, literary activities are more likely to be an adaptation.Two methods in literature research, quantitative analysis and qualitative research, have been entangled in the argument of "scientific authority". Both of them get the success in literary criticism of evolutionary psychology. Quantitative analysis gives a general picture about the human nature in literature, but ignore the individuality of it, which is the life of literature. However, qualitative research also inquiries human nature on a perspective of evolutionary psychology, but provided more details about the inner world of the character in specific.In literary criticism of evolutionary psychology, qualitative research is the mainstream. But most of them are narrowed in the study of mating theory and sex differences theory. Here, from the evolutionary psychological perspective, I analyzed the life of Flaubert and the mating strategies of gender in his famous work Madame Bovary, and developed new perspectives of module theory and decoupling theory in interpreting the tragedy life of Madame Bovary.