Nethered Regions an Anatomy of Mina Loy

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.

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 Taking in the full range of her writing, including unpublished texts, Sara Crangle’s scholarship is sharp and full of humanity, concretised and illuminated by her deep understanding of Loy’s unfixable genius.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsPreface. "Of the Cuttings a Garden of Ecstasy": Anatomising Mina LoyPart IIntroduction. "About to be a Body": Loy’s Corporeality1. Loy’s Atavistic Avant-Gardism“Being Alive”: Sentience“Primeval Recognitions”: Primitivism“Trailing the Rest of the Animal Behind”: Evolution“Cosmic Force”: Vitalism2. Bodies Sacrificial & Intimate“Passional Compromise”: Modernist Sentimental Economies“Surplus Potency”: Sacrifice“The Instigatory Caress”: Satire and Intimacy“Transpierced Parts” and “Salvation”: Crucifixions“‘Inordinate Chastity’”: VirginsPart II3. Feet, Legs, Genitals: The Pornographies of Loy’s Punctuation*: Queer Pleasures, Women’s PleasureThe Unsentimental Economy of ProstitutionFeminist PornographiesThe Traffic in Men: Punctuating the Sacred GigoloCollapsing, Soaring: Transcendent FallennessDerouted Soles, Phraseless Parentheses: Feet and Legs•, – – –: Puncta and Desire Lines4. "Upon Bossed Bellies": Loy & the Accursed MuseThe Accursed PoetThe Accursed MuseVoicing Damnation: Loy’s MusesThe StomachBibliographyIndex