All Winged Their Supermen: Mina Loy, Olive Moore, and the Transhumanist Imagination

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 Lo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inELH Vol. 90; no. 4; pp. 1159 - 1186
Main Author Linett, Maren
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2023
Subjects
American literature
British & Irish literature
English literature
Evolution
Fertility
Genetic engineering
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860-1935)
Huxley, Aldous (1894-1963)
Irish literature
Literature
Marriage
Men
Modernism
Novels
Poetry
Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950)
Transhumanism
Women
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0013-8304
1080-6547
1080-6547
DOI:10.1353/elh.2023.a914019