Abstract

During the past couple of decades the evolutionary approach to literary studies has gained momentum and produced a growing number of studies and thought-provoking debates.1 The time has come to reexamine core assumptions of the evolutionary approach to literary studies and to offer several conceptual and methodological clarifications. Without such clarifications this attractive and high-profile approach would have become an ephemeral mutation rather than an enduring and fruitful branch of literary studies. The use of biological terms in literary studies is by no means new. It can be traced back to the first systematic treatment of literature in Western culture: in his Poetics, Aristotle describes the...