The Self-Help Compulsion

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 practical 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 Flauberts mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abbys cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolfs 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 also traces the self-help industrys tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach todays university. Offering a new history of self-helps origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-helps most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.