Verfasst von:	Blum, Beth [VerfasserIn]
Titel:	The self-help compulsion
Titelzusatz:	searching for advice in modern literature
Verf.angabe:	Beth Blum
Verlagsort:	New York
Verlag:	Columbia University Press
E-Jahr:	2020
Jahr:	[2020]
Umfang:	xiv, 328 Seiten
Illustrationen:	Illustrationen
Fussnoten:	Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN:	978-0-231-19492-1
Abstract:	"Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day"--
	"Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers' rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert's mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby's cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf's ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She traces the self-help industry's tendency to quote, repurpose, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what self-help might have to teach today's university. Offering a new account of self-help's origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help's most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read" --
URL:	Inhaltsverzeichnis: https://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9780231194921.pdf
Schlagwörter:	(s)Lektüre    / (s)Lebenshilfe    / (s)Literatur    / (z)Geschichte 1880-2019
Sprache:	eng
Bibliogr. Hinweis:	Erscheint auch als : Online-Ausgabe: Blum, Beth: The self-help compulsion. - New York, NY : Columbia University Press, 2020. - 1 Online-Ressource (xvi, 328 Seiten)
RVK-Notation:	EC 2000
	EC 2430
K10plus-PPN:	1668407825