Dirk Vanderbeke is Professor of English Studies at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. He has published on a variety of topics, e.g. physics and literature, evolutionary criticism, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, John Milton, and popular narratives including comics and graphic novels.Brett Cooke is Professor of Russian at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Pushkin and the Creative Process, and Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We, (co-) editor of Sociobiology and the Arts, The Fantastic Other, Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Art, and Critical Insights: War and Peace.

"[…] this edited volume is an excellent addition to the study of popular culture, introducing a wider variety of narrative to the Darwinian approach. […] It is encouraging to see such a broad range of narrative included, especially some of those often aimed at a young audience, such as graphic novels and Harry Potter. As someone who has dabbled in this area myself and advocated for the study of popular culture as artifacts of human nature, I highly recommend Evolution and Popular Narrative to anyone interested in the application of evolution to the arts or the study of popular culture in general."-Catherine Salmon, in Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2020, pp. 141-143

• List of FiguresIntroductionBrett Cooke and Dirk Vanderbeke1 Evolution and Slasher FilmsMathias Clasen and Todd K. Platts2 Remaking, or Not, the Classics: Straw Dogs and Biocultural Stability in Rape-Revenge MoviesDavid Andrews3 Imagining the End of the World: a Biocultural Analysis of Post-Apocalyptic FictionMathias Clasen4 On Love and Marriage in Popular GenresDirk Vanderbeke5 Social Network Complexity in Mozart’s Marriage of FigaroTamás Dávid-Barrett, James Carney, Anna Rotkirch, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo6 Banal Classicism and Borrowed Ethos in the Rhetorics of Human and Nonhuman AnimalsAlex C. Parrish7 The Reader Is Always Right. Biopoetic and Cognitive-Aesthetic Aspects of Karl May’s Adventure Novel Winnetou ISophia Wege8 Why We Read Detective Fiction: Theory of Mind in ActionJudith P. Saunders9 Handel, Senesino, and Giulio Cesare, or the Irreversible Decline of Opera SeriaBrett Cooke10 We’ve Evolved into the Gutters: Using Cognition and a Graphic Novel to Kill ShakespeareJoe Keener11 Theory of Mind and Mind Eating: the Popular Appeal of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice and ZombiesKathryn Duncan12 The Relevance of Popularity: Ecological Factors at Play in Story PervasivenessMichelle Scalise Sugiyama13 A Quantitative Approach to Counterintuitive Imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter NovelsTom DolackIndex

Dirk Vanderbeke is Professor of English Studies at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. He has published on a variety of topics, e.g. physics and literature, evolutionary criticism, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, John Milton, and popular narratives including comics and graphic novels.Brett Cooke is Professor of Russian at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Pushkin and the Creative Process, and Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We, (co-) editor of Sociobiology and the Arts, The Fantastic Other, Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Art, and Critical Insights: War and Peace.

"[…] this edited volume is an excellent addition to the study of popular culture, introducing a wider variety of narrative to the Darwinian approach. […] It is encouraging to see such a broad range of narrative included, especially some of those often aimed at a young audience, such as graphic novels and Harry Potter. As someone who has dabbled in this area myself and advocated for the study of popular culture as artifacts of human nature, I highly recommend Evolution and Popular Narrative to anyone interested in the application of evolution to the arts or the study of popular culture in general."-Catherine Salmon, in Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2020, pp. 141-143

• List of FiguresIntroductionBrett Cooke and Dirk Vanderbeke1 Evolution and Slasher FilmsMathias Clasen and Todd K. Platts2 Remaking, or Not, the Classics: Straw Dogs and Biocultural Stability in Rape-Revenge MoviesDavid Andrews3 Imagining the End of the World: a Biocultural Analysis of Post-Apocalyptic FictionMathias Clasen4 On Love and Marriage in Popular GenresDirk Vanderbeke5 Social Network Complexity in Mozart’s Marriage of FigaroTamás Dávid-Barrett, James Carney, Anna Rotkirch, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo6 Banal Classicism and Borrowed Ethos in the Rhetorics of Human and Nonhuman AnimalsAlex C. Parrish7 The Reader Is Always Right. Biopoetic and Cognitive-Aesthetic Aspects of Karl May’s Adventure Novel Winnetou ISophia Wege8 Why We Read Detective Fiction: Theory of Mind in ActionJudith P. Saunders9 Handel, Senesino, and Giulio Cesare, or the Irreversible Decline of Opera SeriaBrett Cooke10 We’ve Evolved into the Gutters: Using Cognition and a Graphic Novel to Kill ShakespeareJoe Keener11 Theory of Mind and Mind Eating: the Popular Appeal of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice and ZombiesKathryn Duncan12 The Relevance of Popularity: Ecological Factors at Play in Story PervasivenessMichelle Scalise Sugiyama13 A Quantitative Approach to Counterintuitive Imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter NovelsTom DolackIndex

Dirk Vanderbeke is Professor of English Studies at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. He has published on a variety of topics, e.g. physics and literature, evolutionary criticism, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, John Milton, and popular narratives including comics and graphic novels.Brett Cooke is Professor of Russian at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Pushkin and the Creative Process, and Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We, (co-) editor of Sociobiology and the Arts, The Fantastic Other, Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Art, and Critical Insights: War and Peace.

"[…] this edited volume is an excellent addition to the study of popular culture, introducing a wider variety of narrative to the Darwinian approach. […] It is encouraging to see such a broad range of narrative included, especially some of those often aimed at a young audience, such as graphic novels and Harry Potter. As someone who has dabbled in this area myself and advocated for the study of popular culture as artifacts of human nature, I highly recommend Evolution and Popular Narrative to anyone interested in the application of evolution to the arts or the study of popular culture in general."-Catherine Salmon, in Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2020, pp. 141-143

• List of FiguresIntroductionBrett Cooke and Dirk Vanderbeke1 Evolution and Slasher FilmsMathias Clasen and Todd K. Platts2 Remaking, or Not, the Classics: Straw Dogs and Biocultural Stability in Rape-Revenge MoviesDavid Andrews3 Imagining the End of the World: a Biocultural Analysis of Post-Apocalyptic FictionMathias Clasen4 On Love and Marriage in Popular GenresDirk Vanderbeke5 Social Network Complexity in Mozart’s Marriage of FigaroTamás Dávid-Barrett, James Carney, Anna Rotkirch, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo6 Banal Classicism and Borrowed Ethos in the Rhetorics of Human and Nonhuman AnimalsAlex C. Parrish7 The Reader Is Always Right. Biopoetic and Cognitive-Aesthetic Aspects of Karl May’s Adventure Novel Winnetou ISophia Wege8 Why We Read Detective Fiction: Theory of Mind in ActionJudith P. Saunders9 Handel, Senesino, and Giulio Cesare, or the Irreversible Decline of Opera SeriaBrett Cooke10 We’ve Evolved into the Gutters: Using Cognition and a Graphic Novel to Kill ShakespeareJoe Keener11 Theory of Mind and Mind Eating: the Popular Appeal of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice and ZombiesKathryn Duncan12 The Relevance of Popularity: Ecological Factors at Play in Story PervasivenessMichelle Scalise Sugiyama13 A Quantitative Approach to Counterintuitive Imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter NovelsTom DolackIndex