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research, this book challenges the existing critical myth of Loy as a 'modern woman' through an analysis of her unpublished autobiographical prose.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' writer-based on her engagement with twentieth-century avant-garde aesthetics-and 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.
Parmar's incisive examination of Loy's seven unpublished autobiographies both reveals the revival of critical interest in Loy and contributes to the literature on her and to the larger project of redefining modernism. In her own time, Loy (1882-1966) was seen as a marginal, if energetic, modernist, famous for her prominent friends and lovers (e.g., Gertrude Stein, F.T. Marinetti, Mabel Dodge Luhan) and a small, controversial output of avant-garde poetry. Parmar (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) argues that Loy's prose reveals her ideas about art and her own identity throughout her career. She saw herself not as a 'new woman' but rather as a 'modern' intent on reinventing herself and open to aesthetic experiences not bounded by gender or validated by museums and galleries. 'For Loy,' Parmar writes, 'being modern is a transition; it is a process rather than a reflection of a historical point in time and it defies any notion of a stable authorial unity.' Parmar's focus on Loy's prose invites future scholarship on the trajectory of Loy's career, her critique of modernist goals and strategies, her grappling with her own history and heritage, and her artistry. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
