Abstract
Recent scholarship has demonstrated some of the ways modernism depends on eugenic thinking. Exploring similarities and differences between eugenics and early transhumanism, this article identifies in modernist literature a strand of more radical transhumanist desire. Looking in particular at Mina Loy's poems "Parturition" and "Songs to Joannes" and Olive Moore's novel Spleen, it argues that these texts turn the modernist call to "make it new" on human beings ourselves, as Loy and Moore imagine maternity as a means to advance evolution, if only it could transcend the disappointing reproducibility of the human being.
Date of this Version
2023
Recommended Citation
“All Winged Their Supermen: Mina Loy, Olive Moore, and the Transhumanist Imagination.” ELH: English Literary History,vol. 90, no. 4, Winter 2023, pp. 1159–1186. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914019
Comments
This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M. (2023). All Winged Their Supermen: Mina Loy, Olive Moore, and the Transhumanist Imagination. ELH 90(4), 1159-1186. Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press; the version of record is available at DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914019.