French Literature Reviews - 2026

W. Flesch, Comeuppance. Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics

William FLESCH, Comeuppance. Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction

Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2008, 264 p.
EAN : 9780674026315

SUMMARY

With Comeuppance, William Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh.

Fiction, Flesch contends, gives us our most powerful way of making sense of the social world. Comeuppance begins with an exploration of the appeal of gossip and ends with an account of how we can think about characters and care about them as much as about persons we know to be real. We praise a storyteller who contrives a happy or at least an appropriate ending, and fault the writer who refuses us one. Flesch uses Darwinian theory to show how fiction satisfies our desire to see the good vindicated and the wicked get their comeuppance. He conveys the danger and excitement of reading fiction with nimble intelligence and provides wide reference to stories both familiar and little known.

BIOGRAPHY

William Flesch is Professor of English Literature at Brandeis University and author of Generosity and the Limits of Authority.

The intersection of literary studies and evolutionary biology represents a long-standing interdisciplinary inquiry into the adaptive functions of narrative art. Scholars in this tradition examine how storytelling mechanisms, emotional responses to characters, and desires for narrative closure might reflect evolved human behavioral traits and social cognition. By considering concepts such as costly signaling and altruistic punishment within literary frameworks, researchers seek to understand the universal human compulsion to engage with imagined scenarios and the moral evaluations they provoke.

William Flesch addresses these themes by drawing on Darwinian theory to investigate the structural appeal of narrative resolutions, the mechanics of gossip, and the cognitive basis for emotional investment in literary figures. The volume references a wide range of familiar and lesser-known works to illustrate how formal elements and thematic content interact within the reading experience. Readers interested in evolutionary approaches to narrative structure and the psychological dimensions of reading may find it relevant to these broader critical discussions.