Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help

Following her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of Cambridge, Gillian Moore completed an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. She also recently graduated from an MSc in Psychology at the University of Kent where her research focused on interoceptive processes and the psychology of embodiment. Awards she has received include the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Award, Cambridge Trust Vice-Chancellor's Award, and Trinity College Dublin Gold Medal. Her research centres on the relationships between contemporary literature, therapeutic rhetoric, public speech, and psychology, with new work focusing on embodied practices of reading and literary depictions of interoceptive and proprioceptive processes. She is Reviews Editor at Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly and is committed to public literary engagement and communicating academic ideas to broader audiences.

• 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.