| In this feminist critical biography, I suggest that Loy's extravagant poetic reflects her exaggerated style of living and her ever-altering, internally conflicted philosophical stances---stances which were strongly influenced by the literary and visual cultures of her time. "Extravagant Poetic" enters into a conversation with many Loy critics, but is most clearly indebted to Carolyn Burke's Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. In many ways, the dissertation shares some of Burke's interests in Loy---Loy's years with the futurists, her avant-gardism, her feminism; however, the dissertation often spends more time with different cultural trends such as the rise of antisentimentalism, the cult of motherhood, the social purity movement, and eugenics/mongrelization than Burke's biography. Cristanne Miller's Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schuler has also been influential in that Miller addresses the influence of place on Loy's work. I too argue that Loy was heavily influenced by the cultural trends of her European and American circles. "Extravagant Poetic" is also indebted to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's main argument in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century , that the late nineteenth century and the entire twentieth century entailed a gender battle that greatly affected modernism. Particularly in her early years of writing, Loy was caught up in this battle. The dissertation also investigates Loy's later years and writings. It traces Loy's mystical and Christian Scientific beliefs to a hybrid belief system and aesthetic and discusses the two strands of Loy's late homage poems. My dissertation, then, examines Loy's role as a feminist; it looks at what Loy may have done for and against feminist progress in her time. Considered the epitome of the "New Woman" in 1917 New York, Loy was an emblematic feminist at the time. However, her life and work make some recent critics uncomfortable with identifying Loy as a feminist. It is my hope that "Extravagant Poetic" will help to establish Loy's place as a feminist in the Anglo-American literary canon. |
