This Master's thesis investigates the ways in which the concept of the self is represented in the English and Russian therapeutic discourses of self-help literature by means of conceptual metaphor. Viewing self-help as a global phenomenon, the study examines the influence of self-help culture on the expression of selfhood and identity. It individually deals with the development of self-help culture and literature in the United States and Russia. The empirical part of the thesis is dedicated to the analysis of English and Russian self-help discourses and is based on a corpus comprised of 360 conceptual metaphor examples which were manually extracted from six self-help books (3 English and 3 Russian). The thesis discovers the extent to which the English and Russian metaphorical representations of the self coincide, and lays out the similarities and differences between them.
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