Introduction: Literary Advice from Quill to Keyboard

Abstract

This chapter presents a brief history of the dominant, Anglo-American literary advice tradition from the nineteenth century to the present as well as a state of the art of the existing scholarship on literary advice. We focus on several key moments for literary advice in the USA and in the UK: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), the debate between Sir Walter Besant and Henry James surrounding “The Art of Fiction” (1884), the era of the handbook (1880s–1930s), the “program era” (McGurl 2009) and postwar literary advice, the rise of the “advice author” in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally advice in the “digital literary sphere” (Murray 2018). The overview captures both the remarkable consistency and the transformations of advice, against the background of changes in the literary system, the rise of creative writing, changes in the publishing world, and the rise of the Internet and self-publishing. It highlights the role of some specific actors in the literary advice industry, such as moguls, women, and gurus, and draws attention to a number of subgenres (genre handbooks, self-help literary advice, and the writing memoir), as well as to counter-reactions and resistance to advice in literary works and in avant-garde manuals. Advice is regarded both in the context of the professionalization of authorship in a literary culture shaped by cultural and creative industries, and of the exponential increase of amateur creativity.

The sleeping voices: Evaluating parenting ‘self‐help’ books, narratives of rule, routine and ritual

“…Other researchers have previously problematised the usefulness of self‐help books, for example Sandretto and Nairn (2019), who ask questions around texts offering advice about raising boys. Work on the history of advice manuals indicates how the genre is, and always has been, linked to drumming up sales, whether that be ‘selling the self’ through self‐improvement measures, or as a writer selling marketable material (see for example Masschelein, 2021on the history of advice writing).…”