- Set in the present day.
- No such thing as a successful relationship.
- Only deals with mundane concerns.
- Murder is avoided. Death is common.
- Written in a “style,” where the images and metaphors call attention to themselves.
- Focuses on the relationships of characters instead of plot.
- It has a message. The message is always very oblique. It is never stated directly.
- No one is ever actually happy about their lives.
Pretty sweeping. Wolf Hall, a recent booker prize winner, does not meet most of those criteria. I’d say it meets 5 and 6 (although plot is hardly ignored), but none of the rest.
So well known literary fiction author Umberto Eco’s works wouldn’t qualify. Neither would “I write literary fiction, dammit” snob Margaret Atwood (who I adore, but is a complete genre snob). Nor Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie or A.S. Byatt, Pultizer winner Michael Chabon…?
I think RealityChuck’s list is at least partially tongue in cheek.
Despite Atwood’s protestations I think it’s impossible to deny that the Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake are science fiction. I’m a huge Eco fan and I shelve him near my Vance and Stephenson. Rushdie goes on the same shelf (as would Byatt if I’d bought any of her books).
Are there really authors who describe themselves as writing “literary fiction” and mean something by it in a genre sense? Who think that a particular’s work’s being classed as “science fiction” excludes it from the previous category?
And if so, how do they, or their readers, conceive this genre?
Must everything be in a genre now?
If it helps, I’ve read Eco and Chabon, and is it Neal Stephenson meant there? Him too.
The older I get the less I’m inclined to plow thru things like Joyce and Wolfe. Am currently going thru ALL of Robert B. Parker’s detective novels (a list at least 50 or 60 items long). He may be considered a purveyor of junk novels, but he can flesh out a character and make them come alive in just two or three sentences, something that I’ve found many other authors have trouble doing.
Okay, I read some other stuff on “literary fiction.” Meh. No sign of traditions of theme and setting analogous to those of recognized genres. It seems to be mainly a marketing term.
*All *genre labels are marketing terms. “If you liked X you will like Y” is the essential message.
That said, one of the effects of passing time is that the crap is swept away. As Theodore Sturgeon noted, 90% of everything is crap, and certainly 90% of novels published in a given year are crap. It is just that the crappy novels published in 1920 are really hard to find now; the great ones are still in print. Thus, it looks like the quality is steadily declining, but that is not really true.
Okay the first part of me wants to point out that this appears to be a restatement of the already up to eight years old Sturgeon’s Law.
And the second part of me wants to say “What the Hell, Qin? Where does a ninth grader these days get his hands on the 1959 edition of the EB?”
They are, but they’re not only that. They also give the reader a clue about how he’s supposed to engage with the text. Knowing the genre of a book structures the reading experience before you even open the book.
I can’t quite agree with that. Rothfuss is good, no doubt. Let’s just agree that his books are really good reads. 
If you want my vote for fantasy as literature (recently), I’d highly recommend Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. That book knocked me on my ass it was so good. I’ve re-read it like three times, and considering I devour books, toss them aside and then look for something new to read that’s pretty high praise from me.
Sure the definition of the genre is nebulous. So is the definition of what’s science fiction or what’s horror or what’s fantasy.
At the beginning of the 20th century, pretty much all hardback novels were literary fiction. It wasn’t that H.G. Wells or M.P. Shiel, for example, didn’t deal with themes we would today call science fiction. But that was considered just one dot in the scattergram that was literature.
Commercial fiction certainly existed. But it existed mostly outside of traditional hardback publication. Dime novels were published by the thousands. Magazines printed tens of thousands of short stories. But these were outsiders.
Mystery novels pick up after Sherlock Holmes. But remember that Doyle killed off Holmes because he wanted to be remembered for his good fiction. None of that was supposed to compete with Joyce, but that was never the point. Joyce, even in his time, was as much an outlier as Nick Carter. (A hero of a million dime novels.)
For the rest of the century there was literary fiction and genre fiction. Not difficult fiction and easy fiction, not modernism and romanticism, but literary and genre. Every publisher understood the difference, every bookstore understood the difference, and every writer understood the difference (even though most genre writers hated it). It’s just as true today. There may be an element of marketing to the distinction, but publishing is a business. How could there not be an element of marketing in every single thing it does? Literary fiction is still considered the norm, or maybe the heart of the field is a better way of expressing it from their point of view. Everything else is done to make money. Literary fiction is what publishing does as an art form. There is a similar distinction made for serious nonfiction and every other type of nonfiction. If you’re inside the field it’s a palpable force, the ether made real. Like it or hate it, good or bad, you need to deal with it every moment.
Here’s the list of Pulitzer winners. Doesn’t look to me like much has changed over the years.
Qin Shi Huangdi, do you know who wrote that article for the Britannica? There was a large-scale attack in the 1950s on the popularization of culture, which drew the epitaph Middlebrow. Probably exemplified in Dwight Macdonald’s 1960 essay “Masscult and Midcult.” He’s agin it. That was the high water mark of the anti movement.
I’m emphatically not agin popular culture, but you can’t understand the way the culture has shifted since WWII without knowing what attitudes got overthrown by the 60s and later. Popular culture has won a decisive victory. But I repeat what Chuck said. Not everything popular is good and not everything literary is dull.
I just had a quick look at the winners and nominees of the Pulitzer Prize of the last couple of decades, and although there’s probably some kind of selction bias going on, of those that I’ve attempted, none have been in any way hard to read:
The Road by Cormack McCarthy
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
All as easy to read as your average genre novel. Is it really style (if these novels can be said to have a collective style that makes them different from popular or genre novels) that makes it difficult to read, or subject matter and personal interest?
Spoilers for The Life Of Pi [spoiler]
Wasn’t that kind of the point? Maybe not a sudden snapping, but at least a bending of your belief in the situation?[/spoiler]
I think that “literary writers” often write cross genre, while “genre writers” stick to their genre. And that literary writers don’t tend to start with pulp genre books, while genre writers often start at the pulp end.
i.e. Atwood has written SF (I wouldn’t consider Handmaid’s Tale SF, its Alt History, very little Science in Handmaid’s Tale) but she also writes tragedy and drama. Chabon’s earlier works are Americana commentary - dramas - although he has written SF and Fantasy. But Stephenson (as Stephenson) started writing genre, and therefore, although he has crossover stuff, is still seen primarily as a genre author (the Stephen Bury stuff is much less genre specific).
And I don’t thing its “popular literature” against “good literature” - SOME popular literature is very good (or maybe some good literature is very popular). Granted DaVinci Code still sucks donkey balls, despite usually being shelved over with “literary fiction” and sharing a lot of common themes with “Name of the Rose.” But in 1988 Love in the Time of Cholera spent weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list - an example of both “good literature” and “popular literature.”
Finnegans Wake is amazing.
Well, it’s a pretty good description of bad literary fiction.
My stab at defining literary fiction as a genre - it has some theme or character study which is of similar importance to the plot.
So, in which section of the bookstore would you shelve The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs?
I’ve trying to think of who is the least literary novelist I can think, whose writing I really like, and the name that comes to mind is – Elmore Leonard. To me, creating vivid scenes and characters with remarkably few and simple words is a higher art than attempting the same with every literary device in the arsenal.
I’ve heard it said he writes at about a third grade level, which sounds about right to me. I actually think this deserves more credit than less when one considers the final outcome.
On what basis would you make this assessment? Purely in terms of popular recognition and cultural influence, advertising in its variety of media has had much greater penetration into society across all strata, particularly television advertising. The number of recognizable (and oft-quoted) slogans, images, and themes from advertising are so pervasive most people don’t even recognize them for what they are.
Film, as a gross cultural media, peaked in the 'Fifties and has declined ever since the advent of television as mass entertainment. While it is true that most people can recognize and place a handful of quotes and scenes in films (and that as an artistic media, film has traditionally had more latitude and is possible of being less formulaic as commercial television) the reality is that as a durable or persistent influence “great films” are even less known culturally than “great literature”, and the market for film devours the latest popcorn blockbuster (to be forgotten once the viewer is ten steps outside the cinema) over films with substance, plot, or any thematic depth.
Stranger