Cultural anxieties in cultural production

Despite being the subject of debates in literary studies for a long time, research on this topic has been bogged down in cyclical non-empirical debates centered on post-structuralist philosophy, based either on shallow interpretations of dialectical materialism or psychoanalysis. My approach fits cultural anxieties in the general framework of cultural evolution and biocultural criticism, which is better able to model the mechanisms through which content and context biases of cultural transmission influence the way creators shape their cultural products.

To see such an analysis of the cultural anxieties that shaped mid-20th century science fiction, see the article Crisis and Transformation: The Aftermath of First Contact in Three Mid-20th Century Science Fiction Novels, published in the 8th edition of Aigne, the postgraduate journal of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at University College Cork.