Elevated Realms - An Anatomy of Mina Loy

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. Elevated Realms is the first study book-length study devoted to Loy’s affinities with alternative spiritualities ancient and modern. Aligning Loy’s heterodoxies with her vanguardism, this volume considers 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 and nerve centres - Elevated Realms unearths the coordinates of Loy’s esoteric Eros, a transcendent, orgasmic love that is cosmic, intimate, aesthetic and a corrective to women’s disregarded satiation. The requisite counterpart to her acerbic feminist satires, Loy’s Eros re-envisions abjectified, feminised posturing as a dorsality with the potential to access the beyond.

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.