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This article applies a life history model to advance the evolutionary understanding of poetry that inspired nineteenth-century Swedish National Romanticism. We show that the characters featured in two of Erik Gustaf Geijer’s poems, “The Viking” and “The Yeoman Farmer” (1811), display patterns of time perspective, mating effort, and parental invest­ment that are now recognized as central life history attributes: a fast strategy and a slow strategy, respectively. These patterns were identified by undergraduate participants (N = 427) who read excerpts of the poems that had been stripped of identifying information and mentions of romantic or sexual relationships. Participants read each poem and rated each character on validated scales of the life history dimensions of mating effort and paren­tal investment, relationship interests and attractiveness, characteristics of his developmen­tal environment, and physiological characteristics. Results are consistent with generally accepted associations in life history theory and also inform current theoretical develop­ments and debates. Geijer had an intuitive understanding of life history patterns, which he used to create recognizable characters for his Romantic depiction of Swedish history.

This book’s argument about the clash between Darwinism and human psychology assigns a special place to the arts. Literary authors not only engaged with the theoretical ideas of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Haeckel but also mirrored and expanded the evolutionary myth-making of those thinkers. Literary authors writing in vastly different genres extrapolated the evolutionary myths into fictional worlds. Historically, literary scholars have not attended to the psychological aspect of that influence. This chapter outlines the history of previous literary scholarship on Darwinism and explains how evolutionary literary theory advances on previous criticism. Traditional humanists have catalogued Darwinian influences on fiction without aiming for explanation, and poststructuralist literary scholars have explained the influences mainly through ideology. Evolutionary literary theory returns the human mind to the equation.

Perhaps no other author has evoked the cosmic horror of evolution with the single-minded intensity of Jack London. His conflicted worldview has long puzzled scholars. Through self-education and tumultuous life experiences, he became a firm Darwinian and an ardent socialist, deeply troubled by the contradictions between human justice and the natural world. To face that contradiction, he created a mythic life narrative: he split nature and culture into separate realms locked into battle. This chapter combines biographical and historical information with a conception of basic human motives, analyzing London’s worldview as a response to the psychological challenges of Darwinism.

Joseph Conrad is by far the most critically acclaimed turn-of-the-century novelist to engage with naturalistic cosmology. His moral perspective has been much debated by scholars. This chapter analyzes his self-narrative, and its expression in Heart of Darkness, as a response to the psychological pressures of Darwinism. Conrad envisioned an essentially amoral naturalistic world in conflict with moral ideals, saw the human mind divided between contradictory instincts, agonized over the relationship between human nature and political idealism, and depicted Western civilization encountering its deep past in tropical locales. His puzzling combination of irony and simple morality can be understood as a personal post-Darwinian mythology: a simultaneous recognition of human social dispositions and the amorality of nature, united by the idea of nature as spectacle.

To understand how Darwinism affected the literary imagination, one needs to understand how Darwinism was processed imaginatively by the scientists, philosophers, and social reformers who disseminated it. This chapter analyzes early evolutionary thinkers like Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel. No early evolutionary thinker could transform Darwinism into untroubled mythology. But they followed universal features of myth-making: turning evolution into something more comprehensible, orderly, spectacular, and purposeful; translating natural selection into human social terms, as an evil to fight or a struggle toward good; putting humanity back at the center of nature; and devising strategies for circumventing materialism and randomness. These universal features were modulated by cultural ideas, values, and personality differences. Keen minds reached opposite conclusions about nature, shaping enduring myths.

Scholars have disagreed about Joseph Conrad’s work for more than a century. He has been broadly interpreted as both a moral relativist and a moralist. This chapter uses a combination of personality psychology, evolutionary literary theory, and biographical research to explain the contrasting impressions. Conrad lived during a time when intellectuals first faced the psychological challenges of Darwinian evolution. Because of his imaginative neuroticism and extreme conscientiousness, he was particularly disturbed by the revelation that nature is amoral. But he responded with unusual fortitude. He imagined himself as a sympathetic observer of the amoral cosmos, dedicated to simple moral values that he saw as part of human nature. Both his seeming moral relativism and his seeming moralism were thus naturalistic. He neither imposed human morality on the natural world nor discarded morality from human nature. Conrad’s most famous work, Heart of Darkness, enacts his remarkable balance between human psychological needs and non-mythological reality. It is an allegory of facing amoral nature, providing mythic texture for the post-Darwinian world.