The cognitive rhetoricians have introduced the idea of cognitive domains into literary theory, but they have not yet developed a model for a comprehensive, species-typical structure of human motives. Evolutionary psychology can provide this model. Elemental human motives and basic emotions provide the deep structure of literary representations, and this deep structure serves to organize the particularities of circumstance and individual identity. Personal power and reproductive success are governing purposes in life and in literary representations. The concept of individual identity is necessary to literary representation, and a theory of literature based in evolutionary psychology has to incorporate models of personality. Literature and its oral antecedents organize experience in personally meaningful ways. They provide models of behavior and help regulate the complex cognitive machinery through which humans negotiate their social and cultural environments.