Although their settings span a wide geographical area, from the South Pacific to India, Maugham's exotic short stories, novels, and travelogues all, ultimately, focus on the creation of a masculine British identity. In this first book to address Maugham's fiction in light of recent developments in postcolonial, gender, and cultural theory, Holden argues that Maugham's work can be understood as an attempt to negotiate between two alternative masculine identities: those of private homosexual and public writer. Holden identifies Maugham's attempts to cultivate a public persona as a writer...