Self-help books

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.

Informal guides to everyday behaviour might be said to have existed almost as long as writing itself. Certainly ancient Egyptian "Codes" of conduct 'have a curiously modern note: "you trail from street to street, smelling of beer...like a broken rudder, good for nothing....you have been found performing acrobatics on a wall!"'. Indeed, 'some social observers have suggested that the Bible is really the first and most significant and most helpful of self-help books.

In Western culture, a line of descent may be traced back from Samuel Smiles' Self-Help to when 'the Renaissance concern with self-fashioning produced a flood of educational and self-help materials': thus 'the 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 'handbooks and guides...through the centuries' - not to mention Ovid's "Art of Love" and "Remedy of Love". The former has been described as 'the best sex book, as valid for San Francisco and London as for ancient Rome', dealing as it does 'with practical problems of everyday life: where to go to meet girls, how to start a conversation with them, how to keep them interested, and...how to be sociable rather than athletic in bed'; the latter, equally essential, contains 'a series of instructions, as frank as they are ingenious and brilliantly expressed, on falling out of love'.

It is however in the last half-century or so that the humble self-help book has jumped to cultural prominence, a fact admitted by both the advocates and the critics - often highly polarised - of the self-improvement genre. Some would 'view the buying of such books...as an exercise in self-education'. Others, more critical, still concede that 'it is too prevalent and powerful a phenomenon to overlook, despite belonging to "pop" culture'.

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Wikipedia