Kirjahaku

Exploring a variety of everyday human longings as they arise in modernist fiction, this book poses a direct challenge to psychoanalytic criticism that characterises desire as sexual or powerful in nature. Using continental philosophy as its framework, Prosaic Desires contends that human longings are as endless in kind as they are in manifestation. As philosophy moved into the twentieth century, there was a discernible shift in emphasis from individual wilfulness to the role of the other in desire. In examining this historical trajectory, Prosaic Desires considers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but relies primarily on the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, who radically inverts the traditional philosophical pursuit of subjective autonomy by arguing that the self is defined by endless longing for the other. In an extension of Levinasian theory, Prosaic Desires claims that desire-driven shifts from self to other can be located in modernist literature. The banal longings examined here lie within the poles of sexuality and power, and include desires to know and escape boredom, as well as risibility and anticipation. Authors studied include Joyce, Woolf, Stein, and Beckett, all of whom evince a discernible movement away from self-absorbed, grand narratives of desire toward other-based, evanescent longings throughout their careers. Central to their modernist writings - and in turn, to Prosaic Desires - is the conflicted relationship between daily, finite experience and the limitlessness of human desire.

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.

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 feminist vision that aims to resituate marginalised subjects within modernist culture. Elevated Realms – An Anatomy of Mina Loy is the first book-length study devoted to Loy’s affinities with alternative spiritualities ancient and modern. Aligning Loy’s heterodoxies with her vanguardism, this volume analyses 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, nerve centres – Elevated Realms unearths the coordinates of Loy’s esoteric Eros, a transcendent, orgasmic love that is cosmic, aesthetic, and a corrective to women’s disregarded satiation. The counterpart to her acerbic feminist satires, Loy’s Eros transforms abjectified, feminised posturing. Always singular, Loy’s embodied mysticism remains a potent model for the study of feminist spirituality in the modernist period and beyond.

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 feminist vision that aims to resituate marginalised subjects within modernist culture.Elevated Realms An Anatomy of Mina Loy is the first book-length study devoted to Loy's affinities with alternative spiritualities ancient and modern. Aligning Loy's heterodoxies with her vanguardism, this volume analyses 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, nerve centres Elevated Realms unearths the coordinates of Loy's esoteric Eros, a transcendent, orgasmic love that is cosmic, aesthetic, and a corrective to women's disregarded satiation. The counterpart to her acerbic feminist satires, Loy's Eros transforms abjectified, feminised posturing. Always singular, Loy's embodied mysticism remains a potent model for the study of feminist spirituality in the modernist period and beyond.

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.