"The mongrel-girl of noman's land" : Mina Loy's Anglo-mongrels and the rose as autobiography

This thesis analyzes the long poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose by the modern poet Mina Loy according to its function as autobiography. Loy's intellectual environment prior to the poem's 1923 to 1925 publication and, in particular, the writing of the philosopher Henri Bergson shape her thinking about the self and consciousness. This intellectual background provides a foundation for a consideration of Loy's abstract poetic autobiography as what Loy called "auto-mythology." The abstraction of modern poetics provides a medium for Loy's expression of alienation as the hybrid offspring of an ethnically mixed marriage. Loy's long poem treats her heritage and upbringing in a mixed Jewish and Christian household; the effect of this intermingling of religion and ethnicity, or what was then considered race, is integral to understanding both her autobiographical expression of alienation and her optimism about the possibilities for Bergson's "creative evolution.