1In its impressive support for scholarship that moves outside of the box in its method, depth, and length, the University of Edinburgh Press contributes to an already substantive modernist criticism list in publishing Sara Crangle’s An Anatomy of Mina Loy, an intellectually original and richly researched study of this fascinating modernist figure. Profoundly resituating its subject in new and surprising ways, An Anatomy of Mina Loy constitutes a pair of monographs that, together, focus on Loy’s fascination with the body, an aspect of her writing that drew immediate commentary about her first publications in little magazines in the 1910s. Recalling reactions to Loy’s early published works, Alfred Kreymborg’s autobiography notes the controversy that met her experimentalism and frankness about the body:

sophistry, clinical frankness, sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation of grammar, syntax and punctuation […] The nudity of emotion and thought roused the worst disturbance, and the utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd. It took a strong digestive apparatus to read Mina Loy. (Kreymborg 488-489)

2As if determined to mine Kreymborg’s comment for all possible meanings, Crangle multiplies the lenses through which we read Loy’s treatment of the body, introducing and expanding upon a stunning range of contexts, authors, influences, and sources for Loy’s unorthodox thinking. Recognized in recent years as a modernist writer of great complexity and variety, Mina Loy’s career fascinates in its shifting avant-garde affiliations, experiments with genre and media, and geographic migrations. Relatively forgotten until the 1980s, Loy’s innovative writing has increasingly garnered scholarly attention since the 1996 publication of Carolyn Burke’s biography and Roger Conover’s edition of Loy’s selected poems and essays, and the 1991 posthumous appearance of her novel Insel (edited by Elizabeth Arnold and reissued in 2014, with commentary by Sarah Hayden), followed by further publications of Loy’s prose in Stories and Essays, edited by Crangle (2011), and The Lost Writings of Mina Loy, an edition of two autobiographical novels edited by Karla Kelsey (2024). Archival work, enhanced by digitalization of portions of Loy’s papers at Yale, continues to bring new material to light, while approaches to Loy’s work have complicated our understanding of her relationship with other writers, artists, and avant-gardes; her aesthetic ideas, experimental practices, and uses of media; her idiosyncratic feminism and treatment of gender; and her attention to class, race, and ethnicity; and her movements across boundaries of genre, geography, and art. 

3Crangle builds upon and expands foundational readings of Loy’s feminist apprehension of the female body, her graphic allusions to it, and her experimental approaches to language in signifying the body’s corporeal, cultural, and spiritual meanings. Crangle reads Loy’s bodily inscriptions as they are structured around different parts of the body: the first volume, Nethered Regions, examines Loy’s interest in the feet, legs, genitals; reproductive and digestive track; the second volume, Elevated Realms, turns to the heart, spine, nerves, and back. While diligent in tracing direct references to these bodily areas, the books more extensively consider how Loy conceptualizes—rather than directly names—aspects of the body shaped through discourses of art, philosophy, spirituality and religion, science, law, and socio-cultural formations, especially as they attenuate categories of gender and, to a lesser extent, race.

4As the editor of Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), the first substantive anthology of Loy’s largely unpublished short prose, Crangle is well suited to develop the archival depth and cross-genre readings that distinguish An Anatomy of Mina Loy. Claiming a “comprehensive consideration of Loy’s writings” (V. 2, xv), Crangle’s discussions embrace the multiple genres in which Loy wrote, including poetry, fiction, autobiography, literary criticism, theoretical and philosophical essays, and cultural commentary. Moreover, the books draw copiously upon archival letters, notes, scraps, and visual materials; importantly, Loy’s art and design work receive attention in relation to the writing. While recent scholarship has focused upon various genres and has increasingly plumbed the archives, Crangle’s embrace of diverse materials produced by Loy, published and unpublished, is more extensive than I have seen, as is her command of relevant scholarship of both Loy and contextual areas important to positioning Loy in fresh ways. In the breadth of materials Crangle treats, pursuing a distinctively cross-genre approach, she brings together works by Loy rarely (or never) discussed, especially treating genres relatively ignored, such as the short fiction, essays, and performance pieces alongside more critically treated works. Thus, a stunning reading of the interpretively-resistant ballet “Crystal Pantomine,” for example, is as apt to occupy pages as is careful attention to “Songs to Joannes,” a 1917 experimental long poem now regarded as a modernist feminist classic. Extended close readings of such texts, while not the sole or even dominant approach taken by Crangle, showcase the author’s perceptive, careful, and revelatory attention to Loy’s innovative writing.

5Such extended readings, privileging depth and linear progression, embed within a more prevalent and rather heady critical commitment to a more spatial, horizontal form of reading. Enacting quick and considered movements, Crangle’s prose explores an image, idea, or set of references by rapidly circulating among multiple texts, often extracting a single phrase or passage, and positioning these connections within intellectual, social, and artistic contexts. Moving between texts written at different times and in varied genres, Crangle’s weaving together of texts and contexts is often mind-boggling in range: epistolary details, for example, surface in relation to prose passages and poetic lines, or the materials of an art work, as archival and published writings intersect in textual relation to external discourses identified in their historical shaping of ideas of the body. Crangle draws upon spiritual and occult traditions, the rise of psychology and sexology, philosophical thought, Victorian and early twentieth-century legal systems, aesthetic theories of Loy’s contemporaries (especially Georges Bataille), concurrent publications by others and reviews of Loy’s work, and Loy’s relations with other artists and writers, to list just a few. Crangle’s analysis involves sophisticated undercurrents of twentieth and twenty-first-century theories of gender, language, textuality, and psychology, combined with a persistent attention to textual details of form and language. In this latter regard, I find myself lingering over Crangle’s readings of poetic form, as when she identifies the first three lines of “Songs to Joannes” as haiku, or responds to Loy’s experimental page arrangements and marks in an extended discussions of punctuation as a “cartography of the feeling, longing, rhythmic body” (V. 1, 148).

6Indeed, Crangle’s skill in critically synthesizing disparate sources and texts with the broader contexts in which Loy moved, while employing current theoretical frameworks for reading the body, offers a critical method evolving from the informed capaciousness of her readings across the large but somewhat fragmented body of Loy’s work and archives. While at times challenging to follow in the complexity of theoretical arguments, attended by the rapid shifts from text to text, idea to idea, Crangle’s approach seems to mirror Loy’s interest in the body as composed of bits and pieces forming a connective discursive texture. Claiming that an interest in body parts and their “intellectual lineage” or “partial ancestries […] defined […] [Loy’s] vanguardism,” Nethered Regions draws upon and resituates Modernist concepts of primitivism, evolution, and vitalism in relation to Loy’s work (V. 1, 13). In doing so, Crangle identifies a series of contrasting but interdependently generative pairs of concepts running throughout Loy’s work: the corporeal and the mystical; the atavistic and the avant; immanence and transcendence; and the satiric and the esoteric. These contrasting pairs frame the first volume’s attention to the “nethered” areas that are thought of as positioned below, or as lowly (genitals, feet and legs, reproduction, digestion).

7The Preface to Nethered Regions usefully sets up biographical and textual frameworks that will help the reader—especially one relatively unfamiliar with Loy—navigate the complex arguments that follow and the methods that Crangle uses. A fabulous use of letters and modernist texts featuring Loy (such as Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack) interacts with reviews of Loy’s work appearing at the time of her publications to engage our sense of the immediacy of her presence in avant-garde circles, which included associations with Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists in Florence, Paris, and New York. A coherent and archivally-rich biography and chronology outlines Loy’s life to serve as a point of reference for later discussions that opt for organizational modalities other than chronological. And, in prefaces to both Nethered Regions and Elevated Realms, Crangle’s articulate explanation of her aims and arguments is rendered in vigorous, eloquent prose to beautifully frame each volume.

8In Nethered Regions, some of those aims that are most striking to me, both in their originality and provocativeness, include what Crangle terms Loy’s “atavistic avant-gardism” or “rear-guardedness,” a desire to take from and rework the past, rather than break from it, in a moving forward that inevitably involves the body: “For Loy, the way forward is always backward, and the body is the vehicle for all journeys, be they biological, affective, or spiritual” (14). Ancient schools of thought and mystical practice, therefore, are retrievable in and through the corporeal. At the same time, reimagining age-old practices involves particular risks for women, as in Loy’s persistent interest in the ways that the sacrifice of female bodies and agency have served patriarchy. One might think this history, and its continual present, irredeemable, but Crangle centralizes sacrifice for Loy’s practice and theorization of art and society; for Crangle, female sacrifice is knowingly challenged by Loy, even as her work takes part in that violence as part of a desire for intimacy. The embrace of intimacy, in turn, disrupts the affectless veneer of what Crangle calls the “Modernist Sentimental Economies” relying on female sacrifice as the price paid for great art. It is a tricky but persuasive notion of the generativity of violence within Loy’s feminist proclivities.

9Such arguments look not just at Loy’s persistent attention to bodies but at how corporeality is understood in religious and philosophical thought, and in relation to social and cultural understandings and experiences. In one example, Crangle offers an intriguing reading of the painting Untitled (Surreal Scene) (1934), which features a woman’s body facing us, with the insides revealed and reimagined, surrounded by various odd scenarios. The body is both a self-constituting subject—in its imagery of procreative bounty, such as wheat bundles, and allusively suggested reproductive areas—and a sacrificial object—as in the threatening imagery of predation that lurks around the figure. Adopting similar movements of counterpoint, an electric reading of “Songs to Joannes” highlights a language of crucifixion and communion enacted upon and through the female body, revealing the currents between immanence and transcendence identified throughout her work. Crangle’s kinship with theorists like Luce Irigaray and Gayle Rubin is evident here, in readings of women’s bodies, blood, and virginal economies—what Rubin famously called the traffic in women; at the same time, unexpectedly, Crangle draws upon the ideas of Loy’s Surrealist contemporary George Bataille (in ways that fascinate and perplex, for I am not always sure why the turn to Bataille serves the discussion). Sacrifice is also complexly linked to satire, a genre Loy exploited in poetry and prose writings of the 1910s Florence era, especially, and, in the counter-punctual pairing of satire and esotericism, to the influence and theorization of esoteric thought that Loy’s writing increasingly draws upon and reveals, incorporating traditions of the occult, or Christian Science, for example, which Elevated Realms goes on to investigate even more fully.

10Crangle’s highly theorized analysis of Loy’s literary and artistic work accompanies her conviction that Loy’s own production of theory has gone unrecognized. (One might see Sarah Hayden’s Curious Disciplines for a similarly useful claim pursued along different, primarily aesthetic, avenues). Such claims of Loy as theorist receive wonderfully fresh historicization through socio-cultural and intellectual sources. For example, Crangle considers Loy’s essay “The Library of the Sphinx” in relation to the moral and legal regulation of women’s bodies in the 1930s and 1940s. Loy’s essay, concerning male modernist writers and their alleged failure to move beyond old ideas concerning women and especially female eroticism, becomes a “queer, feminist diatribe” disrupting the legal discourse of the time (155). Adjacently, in a section entitled “Economy of Prostitution,” Crangle places Loy’s references within carefully historicized contexts of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century practices, laws, and attitudes regarding prostitution.

11As Crangle traces them, Loy’s methods as a theorist might be said to model Crangle’s own capacious methods of connectivity. In Elevated Realms, Crangle builds upon the ideas and key terms organizing the first volume, focusing on the “higher” regions of the heart, spine, nerves, eyes, and back. This second volume explores Loy’s “esoteric theorisations of Eros as a foundation of her artistry,” eliciting components of thought from Freud, mysticism, atomic theory, the occult, Christian Science, and other diverse sources, striving to situate “Loy’s esotericism within a range of beliefs” across time (xv). The pairs of contrasting themes Crangle identifies in the first volume are reframed in regard to the elevated regions of the body that produce, for Loy, a “somatic mysticism” that “looks backward and forward simultaneously,” a spiritual take on atavistic avant-gardism (xxi). Crangle specifies that “Ecstatic retroversion is the guiding motif of this volume,” as opposed to “progressive, rationalized Enlightenment subjectivity” (xxvii), and focuses on how the “liberation from the chronic trauma of domination turned abuse is a catalyst for Loy’s mystic proclivities” (xxvi).

12The volume’s announced focus on (sexual) mysticism, (feminist) vision, and (esoteric) hidden knowledges notably foregrounds Loy’s autobiographical writings, both as source material for Loy’s thoughts on her own artistry and to theorize how the genre functions with Loy’s writings. Crangle identifies two autobiographical lineages. She defines Loy’s “early career dialogic” as featuring combative female and male vanguard figures; her Futurist-period Brontolivido serves as an example, with its conflicted characters representing Loy and Futurist lovers Marinetti and Papini. Loy’s later autobiographical writings, such as Insel, about the Paris Surrealist scene in the 1930s, are articulations of her “development as an artist & feminist theorist” of Eros and/ as esoteric love. This attention to autobiographical writing adds valuably to the burgeoning scholarship on Loy’s extensive if fragmented writing in this genre, both as a form of what we might now call autofiction, which mines the life but creatively takes liberties with its details, and important and varied experiments in language and form extending over Loy’s life’s work. In Elevated Realms, Crangle also centralizes Loy’s short fiction, exploring mysticism through discussions of the nerves, madness, vision, and telepathy, for example, in the story “Pazzarella,” unpacking the story’s commentary on Futurism’s (and Freud’s) misogyny and violence to assert a “feminised occult prowess” in response while also assessing the story’s connections to the era’s interest in mesmerism (135).

13The concept of the “blind back” concludes Crangle’s arguments in a final chapter that sweeps through three centuries of theosophic, parapsychic, and psychological thought, exploring notions of dorsality in relation to types of vision. For Crangle, Loy absorbs ideas regarding mystical vision, the pineal, parietal, or inner “third” eyes; the hypnotic gaze, gendered gazes, and the prophetic eye, from seventeenth-century figures Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, and philosopher René Descartes, through William James and Henri Bergson, Joel S. Goldsmith, or Frederic Myers, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures connected, respectively, to studies or thinking about forms of perception—psychology, Christian Science, and psychical research. Recounting common understandings of women’s weaker nerves, brain, and spinal cord (Loy herself was diagnosed with neurasthenia and prescribed supine bed rest) alongside postures of passivity and burden (the hunched back), Crangle identifies a through line in Loy’s work that revises the back and the female embodiment and habitation of misogynistically-motivated ailments. For Loy, dorsality or the back, thought to be the limit of our self-perception, and the site of weakness in women, encompasses not a limit but a “portal to a beyond […] the threshold by which we navigate a higher realm as our bodies remain tethered to the third dimension,” enabling “visionary potential” and “transcendent artistry” (156). Thus, the backward vision of Loy’s aesthetic and philosophical atavism generates itself as a form of esoteric, mystic vision, and “unsighted dorsality” that “manifests Loy’s aesthetic and visionary Eros” (156).

14Crangle’s theorization of the blind back is difficult to distill yet offers a bracing run through a whirlwind of Loy’s writings and art, all the while pulling in intellectual and spiritual histories, avant-garde contexts, and details of Loy’s life. Indeed, much that enriches this two-volume study could be described in this way, making it a fertile source for modernist and Loy scholars while perhaps posing formidable challenges for new readers of Loy. I actually felt at times like a new reader of Loy, encountering complex arguments that can be overwhelming in their ambitious reach but well worth pursuing in their illuminations of untapped genealogies, contexts, and critical perspectives. I expect to return to this formidable and expansive study quite often, learning new things each time I do.