This essay explores a contemporary mode of ‘flat style’ which is so overloaded – with feeling, language and detail – that it turns counter-intuitively into something numb and detached, which seems to shut down further discussion, and create impasse. It focuses on three books of poetry by women, published by Faber – Emily Berry’s Stranger, Baby (2017), Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland (2019), and Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue? (2018). While flat style takes different forms in Allen, Berry, and Collins, in all cases it refers to writing positioned in relation to confession or revelation, which performs its own indifference to how it is received. It involves causing (gendered) trouble by refusing the labour of responsiveness to its reader. For Collins, flat style involves intricate collation of details, blurring any subject out of vision. For Berry, it involves postures of poetic melodrama which state themselves ‘flatly’, without apology. Finally, in Allen’s Kingdomland, flat style involves a setting up, then dissolving, of lyric potential (its extroverted impulses towards apostrophe) to create an unsettling poetic always in conversation with the possibility of disappointment. Flat style now may hold itself aloof, may refuse intimacy, as a way of pre-empting, resisting and surviving an assumed readerly inattentiveness.

Nonsense writing often operates through a complex of the familiar and the surprising. This article argues that Edward Lear’s originality—to an extent that distinguishes him from contemporaries like Lewis Carroll—derives precisely from a sidelining of surprise in favor of suddenness: an aesthetic that becomes, in his hands, an ethics of relationship that tenses to an abrupt, unpredictable Other even as it lovingly accommodates it. Carroll’s Wonderland books keep a surprised perspective aloft, through Alice’s incredulous eyes. But for Lear’s protagonists, things are sudden more often than they are surprising. Drawing at every stage on unpublished manuscripts, and rethinking a popular critical image of the poet as a blissful, comfortable refuge for eccentrics and outsiders, the essay contrasts Lear’s writing with that of the more temporally orderly Carroll to argue that, for Lear, suddenness captures a sensation that something might be at once expected and unprepared-for. It goes on to explore how suddenness sends both bodies and feelings out of sync, arguing that suddenness brings home, in Lear’s work, the importance of living tolerantly alongside an unknowable Other. Finally, it traces how in Lear’s hands, the surprising comes to mean something different from the use made of surprise by his contemporaries: the delight of the uneventful, and the persistence of hope for a normal, unremarkable happiness.

Despite Lawrence's well-documented interest in ‘Alpine' landscapes, characters in his Sons and Lovers (1913), The Lost Girl (1920) and Kangaroo (1923) find themselves lingering in and on flat spaces. This essay attends to the dynamics of these flat spaces to complicate critical models which have emphasised sympathy, vitality and responsiveness in encounters with the Lawrentian Other. It finds that in Lawrence's prose, physical flatness offers a mode of habitation, and an occasion for a literary style, which encode a reserved self-presentation, a failure of mutuality and sympathy, and a refusal to participate in an economy of responsiveness. The first section examines the stakes of Lawrence's peculiar insistence that the reader invests in characters and situations which will later vanish from the plot, refusing stable focal points in the novel’s narrative landscape. The second section investigates the relationship between protagonist and flat landscape in Kangaroo to uncover a fundamental Lawrentian trope: openness which is nevertheless inaccessible, demanding a sustained attention that it cannot justify. The essay ends by arguing for the importance, in Lawrence, of relationship which may be at once intense and unresponsive, with one or more of the entities involved flatly complete in themselves.

Critics of Stevie Smith’s work often lean on the word “flat.” Usually, the term is meant to evoke Smith’s “simplicity” and lack of ornamentation, her refusal to lift into “poetic resonance,” or her unreadable tone. This essay attends more closely to flatness in Smith’s work, exploring the ways Smith finds flatness fascinating and proposing that the language of the “flat,” in all its senses, offers an illuminating way of grappling with the difficulty of her puzzling and unsettling prose and poetry. It unpacks the idea of the “flat”—a word that claims implicitly that no unpacking remains to be done—foregrounding the diversity of flatness’s associated emotions, as well as the ways it remains compelling. Drawing out the breadth of aesthetic and interpretative connotations that flatness holds for her, the essay argues, provides a coherent way of reading her work. Beginning with an examination of how “feeling flat” involves, for Smith, a diverse and complex set of emotions, the essay moves into outlining how flat landscapes offer Smith a mode of lingering habitation that derives its interest precisely from the absence of anything evidently interesting. In the process, it offers a critical language with which to approach other twentieth-century writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, whose work has remained elusive precisely because of its insistence that it has made its meaning abundantly available—that it has nothing to hide.

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Why, in the twentieth century, do atheist or agnostic authors write so many hymns into their poems and novels? This essay contends that attending to the frequent but overlooked hymn episodes in early to mid-twentieth-century literature, and to their historical contexts, can complicate our understanding of literary postures of faith, and of everyday sounds as ‘filler’ in modernist literature. Focusing on Stevie Smith and D. H. Lawrence, with reference to a range of other writers, it draws on unpublished archival material to argue that hymn-history reveals an alternative narrative to that of religious writing as conservative, and literary writing as radical. Hymn-compilers often sought modernity, while poets and novelists tended to privilege older, more dated hymns. This ideological clash led to a literary approach which defiantly accommodated ‘bad old hymns’ through nostalgic reminiscence and extensive quotation. Used in this way, hymn oscillates between a status as textual padding and as focal point: an embarrassingly excessive and solid substance which nevertheless enables embarrassment to be discharged. Ultimately, the muffling, ostensibly authoritative substance of hymn, in twentieth-century literature, fills up gaps in which too much might resound or be revealed: it offers literary writing an opportunity to accommodate and neutralize awkwardness, failure and error.

Stevie Smith opens her second novel, Over the Frontier (1938), with her protagonist Pompey musing on an oil painting by George Grosz, Haute École. Depicting a horse and rider, simply and sparsely painted, the image joins a number of horses which recur in Smith’s narratives and offer tempting metaphorical significance. In this context, a critical debate exists over whether Smith invented the painting, or based her detailed description on a real artwork. This essay engages with contemporary gallery catalogues and Grosz’s executor to establish, firstly, that a painting existed with the name Haute École. Secondly, it identifies Haute École as a work still extant and displayed in the USA under the name Circus Rider. The identification of Haute École offers support to many of the excellent interpretations of the image by critics including Kristin Bluemel, Laura Severin and Romana Huk. It raises further questions, as this essay outlines, about the nature of archive research, the movement between simplicity and complexity in a writer like Stevie Smith, and the issue of how her critics might best read her work. In the process, the essay draws particular attention to the interplay, in Haute École, between concealment and openness, mapping them on to the interpretative difficulties which Smith’s work poses more broadly. Even though it eventually resolves into a cohesive trope, Haute École’s obtrusion into the text involves an element of superstitious recurrence: an appearance which is coincidental, irrelevant, in-passing, but which nevertheless seems charged with a significance which passes articulation.

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