The Salt Companion to Mina Loy comprises ten essays by leading scholars and writers on the work of modernist poet Mina Loy.
Loy (1882-1966) formed part of the new generation of poets who revolutionised writing in the early twentieth century. She had personal and artistic links to Italian Futurism and Parisian Surrealism, as well as to individuals such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein. Working with reference to, but also often against the ideas of these fellow writers, her experimental, witty and inconoclastic poems were both distinctive and arresting.
Since the republication of her poems in 1996-7, Loy has gained in stature and importance both in the UK and the US: her writing is now seen as central to literary innovations in the 1910s and 1920s, and she is often a set author on undergraduate and MA courses. Apart from the collection of essays Mina Loy: Woman and Poet published twelve years ago, there is currently no single book on Loys work in print. The Companion will be an invaluable new resource for students and readers of modernism. It provides new perspectives and cutting-edge research on Loys work and is distinctive in its consideration of her prosodic and linguistic experiments alongside a discussion of the literary and historical contexts in which she worked.
The contributors include influential and emerging experts in modernist studies. They are Peter Nicholls, Tim Armstrong, Geoff Gilbert, David Ayers, Andrew Robertson, John Wilkinson, Suzanne Hobson, Rachel Potter, Alan Marshall, Rowan Harris and Sandeep Parmar.
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Mina Loy's writing was for some years beyond the crust of a modernist pie and now appears at or even as the very center of a newer modernism's crumble cake. Whatever her work was and is, there is no better introduction to or discussion of it than this collection edited by Suzanne Hobson and Rachel Potter, which offers a belated homecoming for Loy from British-based scholars and poet-critics. Here we have Loy jostling with a host of discourses, from Futurism to Christian Science, from Jules Laforgue's irony as appropriated by Ezra Pound to Otto Weininger's sexology redeployed by Dora Marsden. Now and again Loy looks a little more "boisterous" (Peter Nicholls) and "ecstatic" (Alan Marshall) than she used to look. I am grateful for the attention to Loy's prosody, for essays on her prose and her late poetry, for Potter's essay on Loy's "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose" and Hobson's on "Hot Cross Bum," for all of it. It's terrific and fun. It's true that no lepidopterist will pin this butterfly, and these writers know it, but we are the better for their trying. -- Keith Tuma Mina Loy's writing was for some years beyond the crust of a modernist pie and now appears at or even as the very center of a newer modernism's crumble cake. There is no better introduction to it than the essays in this collection. -- Keith Tuma This is an outstanding collection of essays, opening up the multiple facets of Mina Loy's rich and fascinating life and work in the most perceptive and illuminating ways. The essays range across issues of autobiography and subjectivity, Loy's poetics and their relationship to those of her modernist contemporaries, and the modes of thought, vision and belief that composed her writing. The discussions of Loy in this collection elucidate at every turn this most complex of writers, while keeping faith with the 'elusiveness' and 'evanescence' which was her signature. -- Laura Marcus
Rachel Potter is a Senior Lecturer in twentieth century literature at the University of East Anglia. Her publications include Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture, 1900-1930 (Oxford, 2005), and essays on a range of modernist writers. She is currently working on a book called Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment, 1900-1940 and an Introductory Guide to Modernism for Edinburgh University Press.
Suzanne Hobson is a Lecturer in twentieth-century literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She has published articles on modernism and religion in Literature and Theology (2008) and Literature Compass (2007) and is currently completing a book titled Modernism, Secularism and Literary Culture: The New Angel.
Tim Armstrong is Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (1998), Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (2000) and Modernism: A Cultural History (2005). He is currently working on a study of the conceptual ramifications of slavery.
David Ayers is Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory at the University of Kent. His publications include Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (1992), English Literature of the 1920s (1999), Modernism (2004) and Literary Theory: A Reintroduction (2008). He is currently working on a project concerning the cultural impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain.
Geoff Gilbert is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris, where he also directs the MA in Cultural Translation. He writes on literary modernism in Before Modernism Was (2005), Scots writing, and sexuality, and is currently working on contemporary realism and its agon with contemporary economics.
Rowan Harris is an independent scholar with a research interest in modernism. Her work focuses on Mina Loy and Dorothy Richardson, and explores the relations between feminine sexuality, the new forms of commodity culture and avant-garde experimentation in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Alan Marshall is a writer, teacher and scholar, presently based at Kings College London, where he was formerly Head of the Department of American Studies. He is the author of American Experimental Poetry and Democratic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2009) and of numerous articles on modern British and American poetry.
Peter Nicholls is Professor of English at New York University. His publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984), Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995, 2009), George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2007), and many articles and essays on literature and theory. He co-edited with Laura Marcus The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2004) and is US editor of the journal Textual Practice.
Sandeep Parmar received a PhD in English Literature from UCL in 2008. The subject of her dissertation was the unpublished autobiographies of Mina Loy. She has co-edited and introduced a critical edition of Hope Mirrlees poetry at Newnham College, Cambridge, which is forthcoming from Carcanet Press (Fyfield) in 2011. She has taught literature and creative writing and is currently a Visiting Scholar at New York University where she is completing her forthcoming monograph on Loy entitled Myth of the Modern Woman (Editions Rodopi). She is also Reviews Editor for The Wolf magazine.
Andrew Michael Roberts is Reader in English at the University of Dundee, with research interests in contemporary poetry, modernism, psychoanalytical theory and cognitive processes in literature. His books include: Conrad and Masculinity (2000); Poetry and Contemporary Culture (co-edited, 2001); Geoffrey Hill (2004). He is currently completing a book entitled Poetry & Ethics, and a book on Digital Poetry.
John Wilkinson is an English poet living in Chicago and teaching at the University of Chicago following a career in mental health services in the UK. He has published six collections of poetry with Salt and a collection of critical essays, mainly on recent British poetry. His most recent book of poetry is Reckitts Blue from Seagull Books.
