DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Review of Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot and Hardy

Authors

Kay Young

Date of this Version

2011

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 42 (2011)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Imagining Minds sets out to read nineteenth-century fiction in the context of modern theories of human cognition and of the mind/body relationship, making the central contention that 'the novel is an aesthetic map to and experience of the nature of the mind-brain' (9; Young's italics). Young takes up concepts from a range of modern psychological theories, especially those of Antonio Damasio, and also makes frequent reference to the revolutionary, and still seminal, work of William James, as a framework within which to investigate how the three major novelists of the title represent the mind's problematic relations with the world as well as its necessary and intimate connections with the body. The resulting analysis deliberately sidelines historical contextualization to concentrate, instead, on the continued pertinence of fiction even to current scientific psychological concepts, but also on the insights which it offers any reader into his or her own subjectivity.

Having outlined relevant theoretical approaches to the mind which she goes on to deploy in her discussion of the fiction, Young turns first to Emma, reading the story of its heroine's personal development in the light of psychological concepts such as Damasio's 'extended consciousness’, which moves beyond simple consciousness of the self to a fuller location of the self in the context of the past, the future, and of other people. James's insistence on the distinction between rational knowledge and more profound, bodily awareness comes into play in Young's charting of Emma's maturation, and his wider sense of the inseparability of the mental and physical is used in the subsequent discussion of Anne Elliot's necessary reconnection with her bodily self in Persuasion, as she reunites with Wentworth. Later, Young examines Jude the Obscure in relation to James's comments on the importance of particular objects of 'interest' in subjective life, and in connection with modern theories of manic behaviour. The psychoanalytic reading of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which forms the final chapter, takes up an approach to the novel which has, of course, been used before, but Young's discussion is new particularly in that it is also rooted in modern neuroscience and psychology.