Joseph Carroll is the leading light of the emerging movement of literary Darwinism, and Literary Darwinism collects his essays on such topics as evolution and literary theory, biology and poststructuralism, and the deep structure of literary representations, as well as discussions of authors as diverse as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy, and Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould. E.O. Wilson describes Literary Darwinism as "[a] brilliant exposition of a new paradigm in literary criticism which, because it is among the first to bridge modern biology and the humanities, has a feel of permanence to it."