Overview

Mina Loy is recognised as a writer who insists on the primacy of the body, but her fascination with corporeality is inextricable from her esoteric understanding of the soul. Over two volumes, Sara Crangle demonstrates how Loy’s visceral focus propels a prescient feminist vision that aims to resituate marginalised subjects within modernist culture. Elevated Realms – An Anatomy of Mina Loy is the first book-length study devoted to Loy’s affinities with alternative spiritualities ancient and modern. Aligning Loy’s heterodoxies with her vanguardism, this volume analyses Loy’s engagements with mesmerism, spiritualism, and telepathy; enchantment and visionariness; psychoanalysis, philosophy, and physics; Christian Science and Theosophy. Attending to Loy’s presentations of the upper half of the body – heartscapes, spines, eyes, nerve centres – Elevated Realms unearths the coordinates of Loy’s esoteric Eros, a transcendent, orgasmic love that is cosmic, aesthetic, and a corrective to women’s disregarded satiation. The counterpart to her acerbic feminist satires, Loy’s Eros transforms abjectified, feminised posturing. Always singular, Loy’s embodied mysticism remains a potent model for the study of feminist spirituality in the modernist period and beyond.

Full Product Details

9781399524322

Table of Contents

Reviews

"Sara Crangle's magnificent Anatomy explores Loy's ""balancing act between corpus and cosmos"". For the boisterous materialism we customarily celebrate in Loy is everywhere shadowed by her equally passionate pursuit of an ""esoteric Eros"". Paradoxically, Crangle's ""anatomization"" of Loy's work allows us finally to see it whole. --Peter Nicholls, New York University"

Author Information

Sara Crangle is Professor of Modernism and the Avant-Garde at the University of Sussex, where she researches and teaches literature and culture from 1850 onward, emphasising approaches experimental and decolonial. Her books include I'm Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn (Shearsman Books, 2020); On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (with Peter Nicholls, Bloomsbury, 2012); Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey Archive, 2011); and Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). With the support of a 2023-24 Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, she is researching and editing Anna Mendelssohn's roman à clef, What a Performance. Her critical edition of Mendelssohn's poetry received award recognition from the Society for Textual Scholarship in 2021.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available