摘要：Kay Young’s Imagining Lives is as creative and rewarding as her title is apt and resonant: Young is at work imagining the minds of three 19th century novelists – Austen, Eliot, Hardy – as they imagine characters that are sometimes mentally sure-footed, more often faltering, sometimes blinded or deaf to what is external to their own egos, sometimes seemingly unconscious of themselves as selves. Young claims “that the novel writes about the nature of mind, narrates it at work, and stimulates us to know deepened experiences of consciousness in its touching of our own integrated minds.” Thus the novel does the “mind-work” of joining the narrator and the character with the reader as it evokes self-consciousness. Closely reflecting upon boundaries and interpenetrabilities among the characters’ external worlds as well as among characters, their minds and their senses of themselves, Young employs the insights of William James and the neurologist Antonio Damasio to underpin her incisive readings. Beginning with James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890), Young works to establish important parallels between theoretical and fictional representations of the mind.
