Mina Loy among the moderns

This dissertation seeks to demonstrate that the modes in which Mina Loy struggled to establish a grounds for self-invention and artistic renewal emerge from the different sets of psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic oppositions she presents explicitly in her themes, forms, and qualities of language. I argue that Loy negotiates the contradictions and confluences between Aestheticism and Futurism in her early career by shifting from an imitative Aestheticism to a Futurist mode that grows, with her feminist point of view, into a poetry distinguished from Futurism, thereby leading her to turn her radicalism back on the Futurists in the form of satire, while implicating herself as well. These tensions become thematized and used as a structure for Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose through Loy's use of verse epic to present her own mythology and seek a third path between two sets of cultural, psychological, and aesthetic antinomies. AMR stands as Loy's contribution to the modernist project of reviving the art of poetry by inventing a form that includes the social reality of the novel while continuing to expand the expressive possibilities of the lyric.;In The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air I show how Loy fails to reconcile a pseudo-scientific 'objective' language with the language of spiritual intuition, while in Insel she succeeds in reconciling the formal and thematic tensions foregrounded in the book itself by inventing a language and a narrative mode for autobiography. The poems of Loy's late period are then seen as an expression of a tension between a need for isolation from the world and an impulse to engage with it, one that echoes with the tensions in her earlier work between a need for an autonomous sphere for Art and a socially engaged aesthetic, an art of satire that could also serve as an art of self-discovery. Finally, I read Loy's 'transvaluation of values' in 'Hot Cross Bum' as an unacknowledged link between an early and a late generation of 20th century modernism.