Self-help book
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
A self-help book is one that is written with the intention to instruct its readers on solving personal problems. The books take their name from Self-Help, an 1859 best-seller by Samuel Smiles, but are also known and classified under "self-improvement", a term that is a modernized version of self-help. Self-help books moved from a niche position to being a postmodern cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century.
Early history
Informal guides to everyday behaviour might be said to have existed almost as long as writing itself.
In Western culture, a line of descent may be traced back from Samuel Smiles' Self-Help to when Florentine Giovanni della Casa. In his book of manners published in 1558 suggests: "It is also an unpleasant habit to lift another person's wine or his food to your nose and smell it"'. The Middle Ages saw the genre personified in ' Conduir-amour ("guide in love matters")'; while in classical Rome Cicero's "On Friendship" and "On Duties" became perennial handbooks - not to mention Ovid's "Art of Love" and "Remedy of Love". The former has been described as a sex book but actually deals with practical problems of everyday life; the latter, equally essential, concerns itself with falling out of love.
See also
- Courtesy book
- List of Self-help books
- Conduct book - A precursor to self-help books from the Middle Ages to the 18th Century.
- Mirrors for princes
- Melody Beattie
- Wendy Kaminer
