Table of Contents

1.       Introduction: Literary Advice from Quill to Keyboard

Anneleen Masschelein

 

            PART I: FROM FICTIONEERING TO WATTPAD

 

2.       Learning Fiction by Subscription: The Art and Business of Literary Advice 1884-1895

John Caughey

 

3.       “You Will Be Surprised that Fiction Has Become an Art”: The Language of Craft and the Legacy of Henry James

Mary Stewart Atwell

 

4.       “Your Successful Man of Letters is Your Successful Tradesman”: Fiction and the Marketplace in the British Author’s Guides of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Paul Vlitos

 

5.       ‘Do You Use a Pencil or a Pen?’: Author Interviews as Literary Advice

Rebecca Roach

 

6.       “Stand out from the Crowd!”: Literary Advice in Online Writing Communities

Bronwen Thomas

 

 

PART II: CASE STUDIES OF LITERARY ADVICE

 

 

7.       Tools for Shaping Stories? Visual Plot Models in a Sample of Anglo-American Advice Handbooks

Liorah Hoek

 

8.       The “Ready-Made-Writer” in a Selection of Contemporary Francophone Literary Advice Manuals

Françoise Grauby

 

9.       Taking Self-help Books Seriously: The Informal Aesthetic Education of Writers

Alexandria Peary

 

10.   A Pulse Before Shelf Life: Literary Advice on Notebook-writing as Event

Arne Vanraes

 

11.   ‘Writing by Prescription’: Creative Writing as Therapy and Personal Development

Leni Van Goidsenhoven and Anneleen Masschelein

 

 

PART III. ADOPTING AND RESISTING LITERARY ADVICE CULTURE

 

12.   Reproduction as Literary Production: Self-expression and the Index in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing

Ioannis Tsitsovits

 

13.   Creative Writing Crosses the Atlantic: An Attempt at Creating a Minor French Literature

Gert-Jan Meyntjens

 

14.   “Mostrar, no decir”: The Influence of and Resistance Against Workshop Poetics in the Hispanic Literary Field

Andrés Franco Harnache

 

15.   Work and Writing Life: Shifts in the Relationship between ‘Work’ and ‘The Work’ in Twenty-First Century Literary Advice Memoirs

Elizabeth Kovach

 

16.   “If You Can Read, You Can Write, Or Can You, Really?

Jim Collins

 

About the Author

Anneleen Masschelein is Associate Professor in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her book, The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth Century Theory (2011) is an intellectual history of the conceptualization of the uncanny.

Dirk de Geest is Professor in Dutch Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published widely in the domain of modern Dutch literature and of literary theory.