Jennifer Schussler in the New York Times:
Popular books applying Darwinian logic to everything from religion to dating to dealmaking may fly off the shelves, but attempts to apply evolutionary theory to literary analysis tend to make novelists, English professors and other humanist types break out in hives.
So I was interested to receive a copy of William Flesch’s new book, “Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Compenents of Fiction” (Harvard University Press), blurbed by no less stout a guardian of the humanistic tradition than Harold Bloom as a “fresh account of the workings of high literature.”
More here.