Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham's Exotic Fiction

by Philip Joseph Holden

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 whose heterosexuality is confirmed through a process of control of language. Furthermore, Holden illuminates the fluidity of language that Maugham, in contrast to his public persona, associated with homosexuality. The basis of this study is the provocative notion that Maugham's texts, despite their exotic locations, ultimately dramatize a struggle over masculine British identity.

Hardcover

First published July 30, 1996

About the author

See also: Philip Holden.

Philip Holden was born in Boston in 1962. He grew up in the United Kingdom, and has lived and studied in London, the United States, China, Canada and Taiwan. In 1994 he moved to Singapore, and he currently teaches literary studies at the National University of Singapore.

He is the author of several books of literary criticism and history, focusing on auto/biography, and Singaporean and Southeast Asian literatures; these include the historical anthology Writing Singapore, co-edited with Angelia Poon and Shirley Geok-lin Lim. His short stories have been published in Wasafiri, The Carolina Quarterly, Prism International, QLRS and Cha. Holden has served as Vice President of the Singapore Heritage Society, and Deputy Director of the NUS University Scholars Programme. His first fiction collection is Heaven Has Eyes, published by Epigram Books in 2016.