The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 2020).

Reviews in: Kirkus, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly, Choice, Baffler Magazine, Forge, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of Higher Education, NBC online, The New England Quarterly, The Hedgehog Review, Haaretz Magazine (Israel) Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden), Gama Revista (Brazil), Aftenposten Innsikt (Norway).

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. 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.

Blurbs & Reviews

Beth Blum has opened our eyes to a fascinating area: the intersection between self-help and serious literature. Blum is deeply unusual among scholars in appreciating the extent to which ordinary readers seek solace and insight in literature―and she explores the consequences of this idea in a series of readings of important and interesting writers. This book is sure to deepen our understanding of a genre of literature that has perhaps been too hastily dismissed in the past. (Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life)

Self-help books have become the favorite reading of Americans, and English professors are no exception. Until Beth Blum’s ferociously witty yet ultimately sympathetic study, however, few critics saw any way to connect their lowbrow guilty pleasure with the high-flown ambitions of literary theory. Blum’s intellectual history of self-help takes seriously the ideas as well as the institutions involved in the production of this body of practical knowledge. Self-help thus stands revealed as the uncanny double not just of literature itself but of literary theory. (Leah Price, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books)

In this witty and original study, Beth Blum traces the diffusion of a nebulous genre―textual advice―into artistic zones in which one does not expect to find it. Unpacking self-help’s collectivist, working-class origins, and tracing the impact of its commercialization on the styles of James, Woolf, Beckett, Joyce, and others, Blum’s story of popular morality’s various roles in the genealogy of modernism unfolds with critical incision and humor. What an eye-opening book! (Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago)

Beth Blum places us at the cross road of creation. Here at last we can see the “self-improvement axioms” hidden in the rarified atmosphere of Virginia Woolf’s modernism, Marcel Proust in the company of advice columnist Ann Landers, a poem by Baudelaire enumerating his recent reading of self-help books. In moments of acute love or loss or fear, literature can feel like a rope bridge carrying us safely across a ravine. Beth Blum’s brilliant and startling book shows us why. (Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University)

Beth Blum’s The Self-Help Compulsion is the first book to explore the multiple forms of contact, influence, negotiation, strife, and imitation between modern fiction and self-help literature, and the result is breathtaking. Any scholars who assume that self-help books are not worth their attention or that self-help and serious literature have nothing to do with each other will be wholly disabused and wonderfully edified by Blum’s magisterial study. (Timothy Aubry, author of Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures)

A deep scholarly probe into self-help’s inextricable influence on the history and future of literature. (Kirkus Reviews)

Blum’s outstanding debut places self-help books in historical and literary contexts. . . . This insightful look at a popular genre will give fans and critics alike much to contemplate. (Publishers Weekly)

Self-help offers us insight into the real power of literature: that books can and even should help readers remake their world. (Nation)

Blum's thorough review of 19th-and 20th-century self-help literature will inform readers not only about the literature but also about themselves. (Choice)

Beth Blum’s rich and fascinating study The Self-Help Compulsion, an overdue effort by a literary scholar to reframe the relationship between those 'ambivalent shelf-fellows' self-help and literature as one of mutual fascination rather than antipathy. Blum makes a compelling case for self-help as an important 'shadow genre' for literature. (Times Literary Supplement)