Evolution of Modern Literature and Film

Abstract

The evolution of complex narratives, such as fictional books or films, is a fairly new area of cultural-evolutionary research. It gained momentum only recently, when researchers got access to large datasets of literature, movies, and other kinds of storytelling, allowing us to discover long-lasting historical trends and regularities. This chapter, first, discusses a theoretical question: in what sense do narratives evolve? More precisely, it focuses not on the transmission of stories themselves, but on the evolution of narrative forms, or techniques of storytelling. Then, the chapter proceeds to describing how content-based, or hedonic, selection influences the evolution of narrative forms—and briefly, the role of several other evolutionary mechanisms, such as drift and accumulation of innovations. Finally, the chapter schematically presents the methods used for studying the evolution of literature and film at a large scale: from manual coding to text mining and other computational techniques.