This pioneering study applies game theory to a selection of minoritarian texts from the American canon. Concentrating on rational decision making, the discussion introduces the most common social dilemmas such as the Stag Hunt and the Prisoner's Dilemma as a means of interpreting works by writers such as Douglass, Hurston, and Morrison.

Displaying a wide range of knowledge and interpretive skill, Darwin and Faulkner's Novels reexamines the fiction of the great twentieth century American author from the interdisciplinary perspective of sociobiology. Challenging the assumption that Faulkner's South was nothing other than a reactionary wilderness and charting the manner in which Faulkner learned and applied his evolutionary concepts, this book unsettles staid interpretations of the Falknerian canon and overturns habitual judgments as to the value of his later novels.

This book offers the first full-length study of the chess structures, motifs, and imagery in William Faulkner's Knight's Gambit . Wainwright looks at the importance of chess as a literary device and examines the structural analogy drawn between the game and linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure.

This book draws on post-Darwinian advances in scientific disciplines to reanalyze canonical works of literature. This wide-ranging analysis includes studies of the works of Oscar Wilde, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Giovanni Boccaccio, Theodore Dreiser, John Roderigo Dos Passos, and William Faulkner.

If game theory, the mathematical simulation of rational decision-making first axiomatically established by the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann, is to prove worthy of literary hermeneutics, then critics must be able to apply its models to texts written without a working knowledge of von Neumann's discipline in mind. Reading such iconic novels as Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye from the perspective of the four most frequently encountered coordination problems - the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, Game Theory and Postwar...

This book draws on post-Darwinian advances in scientific disciplines to reanalyze canonical works of literature. This wide-ranging analysis includes studies of the works of Oscar Wilde, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Giovanni Boccaccio, Theodore Dreiser, John Roderigo Dos Passos, and William Faulkner.

"This book offers the first full-length study of the chess structures, motifs, and imagery in William Faulkner's Knight's Gambit. Wainwright looks at the importance of chess as a literary device and examines the structural analogy drawn between the game and linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure"--

Displaying a wide range of knowledge and interpretive skill, Darwin and Faulkner's Novels reexamines the fiction of the great twentieth century American author from the interdisciplinary perspective of sociobiology. Challenging the assumption that Faulkner's South was nothing other than a reactionary wilderness and charting the manner in which Faulkner learned and applied his evolutionary concepts, this book unsettles staid interpretations of the Falknerian canon and overturns habitual judgments as to the value of his later novels.

The Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship examines William Shakespeare's rationality from a Ramist perspective, linking that examination to the leading intellectuals of late humanism, and extending those links to the life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.