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.

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.

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. Nethered Regions - An Anatomy of Mina Loy develops new thinking on Loy's representations of the foundations of existence, exploring topics that include sentience, primitivism, evolution, vitalism and sensibility. Dubbing Loy an atavistic vanguardist, this book aligns sacrifice and satire, demonstrating how Loy devises an original feminist satirical mode by which sardonic aggression is aimed at generating intimacy and proximity, rather than ironised distance. Loy's articulations of 'low' body parts - feet, legs, genitals, bellies and wombs - are explored in chapters that theorise her deployment of 'dissident' sexualities (queerness, prostitution, women's pleasure) and censorship; pictorial-poetic cartographies of desire; and the accursed muse that is unsung counterpart to the poete maudit.

Studying the work of Joyce, Woolf, Stein and Beckett, Sara Crangle explores the everyday human longings found in Modernist writing. This discussion is set within a framework of continental philosophy, particularly the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas.

The disconnection between spirituality and passionate love leaves a broad sense of dissatisfaction and boredom in relationships. The author illustrates how our vitality and capacity for joy depend on restoring the soul of the sacred prostitute to its rightful place in consciousness.

This essay collection reveals how bathos has become so central to literature, fine art, and music >