After monographs on Matthew Arnold (1982)[1] and Wallace Stevens (1987),[2] Carroll's publications have centered on situating literary study within the evolutionary human sciences.
In the essays collected in Reading Human Nature (2011),[5] Carroll examined the adaptive function of literature and the other arts, offered Darwinian interpretations of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wuthering Heights, and Hamlet, gave examples of quantitative literary analysis, and reflected on the course of intellectual history from Charles Darwin to the present.
In the research described in Graphing Jane Austen (2012),[6] Carroll and colleagues conducted an Internet survey of reader responses to characters in British novels of the nineteenth century.
The survey used categories from a model of human nature that included basic motives, emotions, personality characteristics, and criteria for selecting mates.
[17] He also has chapters in edited volumes on specific topics in the evolutionary human sciences: violence,[18][19] sociality,[20] death,[21] and emotion.