What came between: short story cycle and critical exegesis

This thesis includes a creative component, What Came Between, and an accompanying critical exegesis. What Came Between is a collection of twelve realist short stories about residents of adjoining terraces in inner-city Newcastle. The collection opens on the 28th of December 1989, the day of the Newcastle Earthquake, and ends a decade later on New Year’s Eve as the BHP steelworks closes and the city’s history of steelmaking comes to an end. This kind of collection, which gains unity from its consistent setting and recurring characters, belongs to the short story cycle genre. The exegesis discusses the two contexts most relevant to What Came Between, that is the realist mode and the short story cycle genre, and notes the relative influences of Raymond Carver and Tim Winton in both instances.