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Abstract
Between the inclusion of works with a lesbian presence in the 1982 anthology Frictions and the publication of two specifically lesbian anthologies a decade later- The Explodittg Frangipani in 1990 and Falling For Grace in 1993 - several writers have emerged in Australia who have produced lesbian texts. While these writers should not be restricted by categorisation as 'lesbian writers', the collection Surly Girls by Susan Hampton (which won the Steele Rudd award for short fiction in 1990) and the novels Remember the Tarantella by Finola Moorhead and Working Hot by Mary Fallon (awarded the 1989 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for New Writing) are notable because they centre on the figure of the lesbian while experimenting with conventions of realist narrative.1 In her collection of short stories and prose poems, Surly Girls, Hampton extends, and questions the nature of, boundaries around gender and sexuality by crossing genre boundaries. Back Cover Blurb plays with both genre and techniques of compression to establish a text which interrogates the construction of homosexual subjectivity as well as the packaging of the book trade: Back Cover Blurb.
Recommended Citation
Boyde, Melissa and Lawson, Amanda, Diving for the Red Pearl: Surfacing and Setting the Centre in Working Hot., Kunapipi, 6(1), 1984.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol6/iss1/45
