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

Author:   Sara Crangle (Professor of Modernism and the Avant-Garde, University of Sussex)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399524339

ISBN 10:   139952433
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   31 December 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Abbreviations Preface: ""[T]hat uncircumscribed entity, an Infinitarian"": Loy the Esotericist Part I 1. Hearts Absented & Newborn: Loy’s Esoteric Eros Loy the Initiate: Esotericism and Avant-Gardism Loy the Adept: Esoteric Eros Ancient and Atomic Eros Part II Introduction: Backs, Nerves, Eyes: From Proneness to Visionary Transcendence 2. ""The Supine Event"" Spinal Irritations and Nerviness: Feminised Lunacy Decadent Languor, Somnolence, and Male Violence Enchantment, Supinity, and the Hypnotic Gaze: Mesmerism and Spiritualism Telepathy, Voices, and Visions 3. The Blind Back Blindsiding Dorsality Backing and Forthing: Pineal Eye, Fourth Dimension Bibliography Index

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.

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