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
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.
This open access collection of essays examines the literary advice industry since its emergence in Anglo-American literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century within the context of the professionalization of the literary field and the continued debate on creative writing as art and craft. Often dismissed as commercial and stereotypical by authors and specialists alike, literary advice has nonetheless remained a flourishing business, embodying the unquestioned values of a literary system, but also functioning as a sign of a literary system in transition. Exploring the rise of new online amateur writing cultures in the twenty-first century, this collection of essays considers how literary advice proliferates globally, leading to new forms and genres.