 Interest in the relationship between Darwinism and the study of literature began in the nineteenth century, for example, among Italian literary critics.For example, Ugo Angelo Canello argued that literature was the history of the human psyche, and as such, played a part in the struggle for natural selection, while Francesco de Sanctis argued that Emile Zola "brought the concepts of natural selection, struggle for existence, adaptation and environment to bear in his novels".Modern Darwinian literary studies arose in part as a result of its proponents' dissatisfaction with the poststructuralist and postmodernist philosophies that had come to dominate literary study during the 1970s and 1980s.