Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help

Name: Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help
Brand: Cambridge University Press
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

By Gillian Moore

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Description

This 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 - it is possible to live and write 'better' in our compromised neoliberal world.

Product details

Number of Pages:: 254
Release Date:: 2025-09-30
Publication Date:: 2025-11-17
Publisher:: Cambridge University Press
Languages:: Original: English
ISBN10:: 1009438492
ISBN13:: 9781009438490
Weight:: 568 g
Height:: 157 cm
Width:: 235 cm
Thickness:: 20 cm

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