Ethics and Literary Worldmaking

Considering poetry, narrative, and performances from diverse oral societies and the earliest scribal cultures, Ethics and Literary Worldmaking traces ways that both oral and written genres participate in communal shaping and reshaping of affectivity, sociality, deliberation, and evaluation. The study views delineation and revision of shared imagined “worlds” as itself an evolutionary adaptive activity, one through which humans, like other species, adjust behavior and modify their environments to