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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23680
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23680
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think it is a mistake to try to define literary fiction in terms of themes, language, or the primacy of plot vs character. I would suggest that it can be better understood in terms of the pleasure it gives.

Stories can give different kinds of pleasure. Some provide vicarious adventure (you want to pretend you are a spy or a mountain climber). Some provide wish fulfilment (you want to get the girl or win the battle). Some provide immersion in a subject of interest (you will read anything about horses). Some provide confirmation of our biases and prejudices. Some flatter our egos and make us think we are insightful or cool or wise. Some provide genuine insight into the human condition.

There is nothing wrong with any of these pleasures (given reasonable proportion). But they are very different pleasures and we may seek each of them at different times. Works that, in addition to whatever other pleasures they provide, give genuine insight into the human condition tend to last a long time and we call them literature. (Insight here does not mean the statement of a psychological truth or diagnosis, but rather a recognition of something genuinely human in the circumstances of the story itself. It is an experience, not a proposition.)

Some works of literature can also be rip snorting adventures or taut thrillers. (Think of Dickens or Joseph Conrad.) There is no limit on either the subject matter or the use of language for a work of literature. It is the type of pleasure and the type of insight it provides that defines it as such.

As a commercial genre, literary fiction refers to works that attempt or claim to provide this kind of insight. Since works of genuine literature are rare, most literary fiction does not provide the pleasure of genuine insight. It may, however, provide the pleasure of confirming prejudices or flattering our belief in our own insightfulness or sophistication.

What makes genre fiction genre is similarly not its subject matter but the class of pleasure it intends to provide. A genre is defined not only by subject matter but by a specific formula designed to reliably provide a certain kind of pleasure to the reader. Many stories involve romance, but a romance novel promises a much more specific formula calibrated to provide a very specific type of pleasure. Not all stories set in the west are westerns. Not all stories set in the past are genre historical fiction. Not all stories set in space are sci fi.

It is possible (though rare) for a work to transcend its genre and also qualify as literature. (Raymond Chandler might qualify here.)

Works of general fiction are those that do not attempt to follow the conventions of a genre, no matter their subject matter. (In some sense, literary fiction is also a genre, in that it follows a formula designed to deliver a particular kind of pleasure.) Some small part of general fiction rises to the level of genuine literature.

Original score: 3