New Journal of Interest

Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture publishes scholarly and scientific articles and reviews on every aspect of imaginative culture: literature, film, theater, television, music, religion, the visual arts, video games, and other media. Works of imaginative culture would include both canonical and popular forms of literature, art, and other media, comics, fads and fashions, hobby groups, sports cultures, creative non-fiction, and the imaginative manifestations of politics, ethnicity, ideology, religion, and other forms of group identity. Articles are written in English, but subject matter can include works from any language and any historical period.

The central qualification for contributing to the journal is to regard works of imaginative culture as arising out of human nature—the evolved and adapted character of the human mind. While sharing a common concern with locating cultural products in human nature, contributors can focus on divergent or multiple features of cultural artifacts: their depicted content, emotional qualities, or structural and stylistic features; aesthetic and intellectual traditions; the responses of readers or viewers; the motives and character of authors or other artists; the ecological and sociopolitical context within which imaginative works are produced; or the psychological or social functions the works fulfill.

The central qualification for contributing to the journal is to regard works of imaginative culture as arising out of human nature—the evolved and adapted character of the human mind. While sharing a common concern with locating cultural products in human nature, contributors can focus on divergent or multiple features of cultural artifacts: their depicted content, emotional qualities, or structural and stylistic features; aesthetic and intellectual traditions; the responses of readers or viewers; the motives and character of authors or other artists; the ecological and sociopolitical context within which imaginative works are produced; or the psychological or social functions the works fulfill.

The journal is open to theoretical essays, interpretations of individual works or groups of works, and empirical, quantitative studies of imaginative cultural products.

Books under review can include contributions to fields such as literary Darwinism, evolutionary aesthetics, cognitive rhetoric, cognitive media studies, neuroaesthetics, and evolutionary studies of religion, society, and politics. Reviewers commenting on books in the evolutionary social sciences would typically consider the way the subjects of those books have a bearing on imaginative culture.

Table of Contents for the First Issue (spring 2017)

Editor's Introduction to the First Issue