Autobiography/Auto-mythology: Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose

Abstract

The work of Mina Loy, a well-known contemporary of H. D., Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (who commended her contribution to modernism), has since fallen into relative obscurity. Perhaps one of the reasons for her fall from prominence, aside from the linguistic, semantic and typographical experimentalism of her writing, is Loy’s heterogeneous textual employment of her own life. There is, indeed, an autobiographical aspect in much of Loy’s work, in the Love Songs to Joannes or the novel Insel, for example, but she never offers a straightforward transposition of personal experience nor an assured assumption of an ironically biographical persona.