Nethered Regions: An Anatomy of Mina Loy

• The first truly comprehensive critical study of Mina Loy, this Anatomy uniquely integrates her published poems, plays, essays, and fictions; her extant archives, and all eight of her romans à clef
• Using Georges Bataille as peer and foil, posits a new theory of satire, one that draws on Loy’s feminist engagement with the sacrificial (and in particular, woman as sacrificial victim), and her desire to bring her enemies into intimate proximity
• Establishes Loy as an atavistic avant-gardist: early chapters offer in-depth, unprecedented discussions of Loy’s relationship to sentience, evolution, primitivism, vitalism, and immolation
• Offers a new feminist theory of modernist affective economies, with a focus on the period’s bugbear, sentimentality
• Theorises Loy’s relationship to transgressive sexualities (queer practices, the sex trade, women’s desire) and censoriousness through a cartography of her punctuation rooted in stigmeology and urban planning
• Via Loy’s preoccupation with the artist’s model, and the as-yet-undiscussed influence of American portraitist John Singer Sargent, introduces and establishes the accursed muse, the unrecognised counterpart of the celebrated poète maudit

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.