Nethered Regions - An Anatomy of Mina Loy - by Sara Crangle (Hardcover)
About this item
Highlights
- 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.
- About the Author: 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.
- 416 Pages
- Literary Criticism, Feminist
Description
About the Book
A uniquely comprehensive, groundbreaking two-volume study of Loy's relationship to the human body and soul.Book Synopsis
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, mystical feminist vision that aims to resituate marginalised subjects within modernist culture.
Nethered Regions - An Anatomy of Mina Loy provides new thinking on Loy's approach to the foundations of existence, exploring sentience, primitivism, evolution, vitalism, and sensibility. Dubbing Loy an atavistic vanguardist, this book aligns sacrifice with satire, showing how Loy resists modernist anti-sentimentality by devising a feminist satirical mode in which sardonic aggression generates intimacy and proximity, rather than ironised distance.
Loy's attention to "low" body parts - feet, legs, genitals, bellies, wombs - is illuminated in chapters theorising her engagement with dissident sexualities (queerness, prostitution, women's pleasure); pictorial-poetic cartographies of desire; and the accursed muse, the unsung counterpart to the poète maudit.
From the Back Cover
[headline]A uniquely comprehensive two-volume study of Mina Loy's relationship to the human body and soul. Mina Loy has long been recognised as a writer who insists on the primacy of the corporeal. Over two volumes, Sara Crangle excavates how Loy's relationship to the human body was inextricable from her esoteric understanding of the human soul. Nethered Regions - An Anatomy of Mina Loy develops new thinking on Loy's representations of the foundations of existence, exploring topics that include sentience, primitivism, evolution, vitalism and sensibility. Dubbing Loy an atavistic vanguardist, this book aligns sacrifice and satire, demonstrating how Loy devises an original feminist satirical mode by which sardonic aggression is aimed at generating intimacy and proximity, rather than ironised distance. Loy's articulations of 'low' body parts - feet, legs, genitals, bellies and wombs - are explored in chapters that theorise her deployment of 'dissident' sexualities (queerness, prostitution, women's pleasure) and censorship; pictorial-poetic cartographies of desire; and the accursed muse that is unsung counterpart to the poète maudit. [bio]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 (2020); On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (with Peter Nicholls, 2012); Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (2011); and Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh University Press, 2010).Review Quotes
This study upends existing accounts of the work of Mina Loy, once thinly drawn as marginal modernist eccentric. Taking in the full range of her writing, including unpublished texts, Sara Crangle's scholarship is sharp and full of humanity, concretised and illuminated by her deep understanding of Loy's unfixable genius.--Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool
About the Author
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.