Introduction

Abstract

The research described in this book is designed to help bridge the gap between science and literary scholarship. Building on findings in the evolutionary human sciences, we constructed a model of human nature and used it to illuminate the evolved psychology that shapes the organization of characters in nineteenth-century British novels (Austen to Forster). Using categories from the model, we created a web-based survey and induced hundreds of readers to give numerical ratings to the attributes of hundreds of characters. Participants also rated their own emotional responses to the characters. Our findings enable us to draw conclusions on several issues of general interest to literary scholars—especially the determinacy of literary meaning, the interaction between gendered power relations and the ethos of community, and the evolutionary basis for telling stories and listening to them. The data on novels of the whole period provide an interpretive base line against which we graph the distinctive features of the novels in two case studies: all the novels of Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.