Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help
Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help
$120.00
USDThis is a book about the encounters that contemporary North American fiction stages with distinct strands of self-help. Its central argument is that the varied practices of ever-expanding and diversifying self-help cultures are generatively elastic sites of inspiration as well as antagonism for contemporary authors: spaces where they can explore what it means to be better on personal, ethical, and societal terms. It offers new perspectives on the work of nine very different writers by exploring how they play different forms of self-help off against one another. This book shows how in the clashes between practices ranging from commencement speeches and grassroots communitarian self-help to time-management productivity manuals, trauma recovery theories, pop-neuroscience, and makeover cultures, contemporary writers try to find ways of reimagining authority and agency beyond individualism, asking how - and if -Â it is possible to live and write 'better' in our compromised neoliberal world.
- Reframes contemporary struggles to navigate tensions between individual and collective change and test the limits and possibilities of individual agency within broader social structures
- Offers new understandings of self-help as a multifaceted discourse and introduces readers to a wide, inclusive range of writers and work that explores the coexistence of multiple lived interactions with self-help discourses
- Contributes to burgeoning fields of literary time studies and embodiment studies, showing how interactions between fiction and self-help can produce new understandings of the complex relationships between time, mind, body, identity, and society
Product details
August 2025Hardback
9781009438490
287 pages
228 × 152 mm
Not yet published - available from August 2025
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. 'An hortation': authority and advice in the work of David Foster Wallace
- 2. 'Unmitigated' self-improvement: self-help leadership, slogans, and grassroots psychology in the work of Paul Beatty
- 3. 'Working on things': measured, managed, and muddled time in the writing lives of Tao Lin and Myriam Gurba
- 4. Getting writing done: Sheila Heti's dramas of productive and reproductive time
- 5. 'We're chemistry. That's what we are': body-brain transformation in the work of Benjamin Kunkel, Miranda July, and Alexandra Kleeman
- CODA: 'all that you touch you change': speculative self-help and ecologies of agency
- Index.
