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.
