Joseph Carroll
Curators' Professor of English 456 Lucas Hall
(314) 516-5543
jcarroll@umsl.edu
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, U of California, Berkeley
M.A., Comparative Literature, U of California, Berkeley
B.A., English, U of California, Berkeley
Joseph Carroll, recipient of both the Chancellor’s and President’s Award for Research and Creativity, teaches Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Literary Theory, Short Stories, and interdisciplinary honors seminars. He is one of the leading authorities on Darwinian literary theory. Professor Carroll is the author of The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold; Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism; Evolution and Literary Theory; and most recently Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. He is currently working on a new book, Graphing Jane Austen: Human Nature in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century.
Selected Publications
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, by Charles Darwin. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003).
"The Use of Arnold in a Darwinian World," Nineteenth-Century Prose 21 (1994): 26-38.
"Evolution and Literary Theory," Human Nature 6 (1995): 119-34.
"Pluralism, Poststructuralism, and Evolutionary Theory," Academic Questions 9, no. 3 (summer 1996): 43-57.
"Biology and Poststructuralism," Symploke 4 (1996): 203-219.
"Steven Pinker’s Cheesecake for the Mind," Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 478-85.
"The Deep Structure of Literary Representations," Evolution and Human Behavior 20 (1999): 159-73.
“Human Universals and Literary Meaning: A Sociobiological Critique of Pride and Prejudice, Villette, O Pioneers!, Anna of the Five Towns, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2 (2001): 9-27.
“The Ecology of Victorian Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 295-313.
“Organism, Environment, and Literary Representation,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 9 (2002): 27-45.
“Adaptationist Literary Study: An Emerging Research Program,” Style 36 (2003): 596-617.
“Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Darwinian Critique,” Philosophy and Literature, forthcoming.
“The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of Literature,” Philosophy and Literature, forthcoming