Still Life features characters who are British expatriates in Italy. The term “expatriate” refers to people who reside outside of their home country. What differentiates an expatriate from an immigrant is the balance between two cultures and nationalities. For example, as much as Ulysses Temper adapts to Italian life and culture, he is still well-connected to his English life and personhood: He is very much an Englishman in Italy. Expatriate literature is an important subgenre because expatriates occupy a unique cultural position, which provides an opportunity to see both (and all) the cultures to which they belong from a new perspective.

Expatriate literature was popularized by great authors like Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night), and James Baldwin (Another Country, Go Tell It on the Mountain), who spent years living in Paris, where they developed their distinct authorial voices. The distance between these authors and their home country allowed them to write about America with the experience and influence of other cultures and the identity of a stranger to a new place.