Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies Myth of the Modern Woman

Mina Loy is recognised today as one of the most innovative modernist poets, numbering Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot amongst her admirers. Drawing on substantial new archival research, this book challenges the existing critical myth of Loy as a 'modern woman' through an analysis of her unpublished autobiographical prose. Mina Loy's Autobiographies explores this major twentieth century writer's ideas about the 'modern' and how they apply to the 'modernist' writerbased on her engagement with twentieth-century avant-garde aestheticsand charts how Loy herself uniquely defined modernity in her essays on literature and art. Sandeep Parmar here shows how, ultimately, Loy's autobiographies extend the modernist project by rejecting earlier impressions of avant-garde futurity and newness in favour of a 'late modernist' aesthetic, one that is more pessimistic, inward and interested in the fragmentary interplay between the past and present.

Sandeep Parmar is Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, UK. She is editor of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011).

Introduction: Mina Loy and the Disguise of Indifference \ 1. The Making of a ‘Modern Woman' \ 2. Modern Anxiety in ‘The Child and the Parent' and ‘Islands in the Air' \ 3. Racial and Religious Hybridity in ‘Goy Israels' \ 4. Insel and the Modern Genius \ Conclusion \ Appendix: Timeline of Mina Loy's Manuscripts \ Bibliography \ Index.