Between Worlds

Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries

Yasna Bozhkova

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Reviews

Between Worlds provides an intertextual and interarts analysis of the work of modernist writer and artist Mina Loy. Bozhkova emphasizes Loy’s complex strategies of collage, condensation, distortion, and displacement, as well as the importance of her perpetual travel between disparate aesthetics, which becomes a means to engage critically with the turbulence of avant-garde innovation of her time. Engaging in a close analysis of her poetry, essays, manifestoes, and fiction, Bozhkova unearths a multiplicity of hidden literary and pictorial intertexts in Loy’s works. Through a perpetual shift of the aesthetic paradigm, Loy creates dialogic exchanges between different experimental aesthetic programs, which positions her not only as an important artist but also as a major theorist of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics.

About the Author

Yasna Bozhkova is a Lecturer in the English Department of the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. Her research focuses primarily on transatlantic modernism, the literary and artistic avant-gardes, and experimental poetry and poetics.

“This monograph’s strength is that it embraces a vast array of sources to draw creative connections that pay homage to Loy’s own predilection for plurality and irreducibility. Its ample use of visual references, beyond just the usual intertextual ones, is particularly valuable for analyzing Loy, whose artistically trained eye lent special importance to such … Between Worlds is such an expansive offering that readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Loy will find it a beneficial and thought-provoking read.”

Jennifer Ashby, Modernism/modernity