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Ellen Spolsky captures this important reversal of the traditional understanding of the relationship between the "cultural" and the "cognitive" when she suggests that the "theoretically infinite number of creative possibilities will in practice always be channeled and restricted by the cultural surround [even if] those restrictions are themselves often negotiable."3 Thus in spite of our evolved cognitive ability to attribute states of mind to ourselves and other people and to store information metarepresentationally, there is no predicting what cultural forms, literary or otherwise, these cognitive abilities can take. To quote Spolsky again, attention "to the complexity of the interrelationships among cognitive and cultural phenomena and the sheer number of possible local variations of these phenomena suggest why a commitment to the existence of evolved (innate or emergent) cognitive structures could never be a commitment to either philosophical or behavioral determinism—quite the opposite."4 In other words, by introducing cognitive evolutionary psychology into our study of the genre, we do not, as a matter of fact, give in to the "psychological" determinism of the kind Cawelti justly feared, but rather we develop a conceptual framework that truly commits us to historicizing our data.

It is tempting to seize on Cawelti's opening proviso about the "present state of our knowledge" and suggest that because back in the 1970s, when he was writing his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, literary critics indeed did not have at their disposal conceptual tools made possible by the recent advances in cognitive evolutionary science, he was only too right to be chary about the tendency to reduce "literary expression" to "psychological factors." Although nothing would date my own work more effectively than claiming that we have noiv attained the state of scientific sophistication unavailable to the benighted literary critics of the previous decades, at least a very mild version of this claim has to be ventured forth because even in its rudimentary state, cognitive evolutionary psychology does offer us a principally new way of approaching fictional narratives. By seeing such narratives as endlessly experimenting with rather than automatically executing given psychological tendencies, this approach opens new venues for literary historians wishing to integrate their knowledge of specific cultural circumstances implicated in the production of literary texts with important new insights into the workings of our brain/mind.

CONCLUSION

WHY DO WE READ (AND WRITE) FICTION?

1

AUTHORS MEET THEIR READERS

fT have argued throughout this book that certain fictional texts, such as

X eighteenth-century epistolary novels (e.g., Clarissa), early nineteenth-century comedies of manners (e.g., Emma), detective novels, stream-ofconsciousness novels (e.g., Mrs. Dalloway), and novels featuring unreliable narrators (e.g., Lolita) all engage clusters of cognitive adaptations associated with our ToM and metarepresentational ability in a particularly focused way. This is not to say that other novels do not (for a characteristically excellent discussion of this issue, see Palmer's Fictional Minds) or that all of the above novels do it in the same way. Clearly, the novels of Woolf and Chandler affect readers very differently and may indeed appeal to very distinct audiences. Still, most of these narratives seem to demand outright that we process complexly embedded intentionalities of their characters, configuring their minds as represented by other minds, whose representations we may or may not trust.

I have also suggested that at certain junctures of human history (e.g., with the advent of print culture and growing literacy), a combination of new technological developments and socioeconomic conditions may make the cultural transmission of such "ToM-intense" fictional narratives possible. Such texts can then find their readers, that is, the people who like their ToM teased in this particular