The second half of the twentieth century saw a growing number of theories ranging from structuralism and post-structuralism to reader-response criticism and feminism alongside the revised versions of Marxism and psychoanalytic criticism dominating the field of literary studies. In short, “theory” formed the theoretical basis of literary studies. Theory in all its varieties saw and defined itself in opposition to naturalism and naturalistic worldviews. The study of literature should be separated from the the study of natural phenomena. In the former, theory tells us, we seek to find the ideological basis of literary texts or their underlying structures which bestow meaning upon them and sometimes we deconstruct the dominant ideological assumptions and binary oppositions of the texts but all these activities have nothing to do with the methods or the findings of the natural sciences. Although the heyday of “theory” has passed, many of its assumptions and presuppositions still dominate the realm of literary studies. Literary Darwinism seeks to transcend and transform literary theory by bridging the chasm between humanities on the one side and the natural sciences on the other. If the study of literature is ultimately the study of the human mind - for the human mind both creates and makes sense of literary works- then the study of literature cannot be secluded from evolutionary psychology and other Darwinian sciences. It is not only our physiological traits that have been shaped by evolution but our mental and psychological features are also the product of evolutionary forces. In this paper, I will try to demonstrate how literary Darwinism will help us overcome the false dichotomy between science and the humanities in the study of literature.

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