Evolutionary biologists have for years attempted to explain why people have powerful emotional reactions to imaginary tales.

They have failed mostly because they don’t understand how narrative works.

"Comeuppance" uses game theory and evolutionary psychology to explain why people find pleasure in both the happy and tragic lives of fictional characters.

New from Harvard University Press:

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.

About the book, Harold Bloom says:

Comeuppance is a surprising excursus into what I might have thought an impossible project. What Flesch undertakes with skill and cunning is what might be called the conversion of sociobiology into its aesthetic analogs. By means of this transposition, we are given a surprisingly fresh account of the workings of high literature.

Consider it alongside Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction