By literature I mean authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, etc. I’m not an english major or a scholar but there is something “serious” about their work that you don’t find with Stephen King or John Grisham. King seems to have a good grasp of human nature and has some comments to make about humanity’s base nature, but, why is Melville considered more “serious” than King? Grisham has a lot to say about race and economics and everyday social customs, but he is not “serious” in the sense that Hemingway or Faulkner are. I am not contesting the idea that one group is more serious or “better” in intellectual terms than the other, but I can’t really explain why/how there are two such groups.
Here’s one attempt to address the difference: What Is Literary Fiction (and What Sets It Apart)?
I don’t think there’s a hard-and-fast line between the two categories (and some would dispute which books belong in which category, or even whether there should be a distinction at all.) But, at the risk of oversimplifying: “Literature” focuses on theme and character and the way the story is written. (Hemingway, Faulkner, and Melville were all influential for their writing style, though not all literature is stylistically innovative). What you call “good fiction” (by the likes of Stephen King and John Grisham) focuses on plot and is concerned primarily with entertaining the reader.
Ah, ok, good explanation and thanks for the link.
I think if there was an easy, right answer to the question, you’d put humanities departments out of business overnight. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The difference is not so much one of kind, but instead is one of degree.
Think of the books that you’ve read in the last few years. Which ones were crap, which ones were good fiction, and which ones grabbed you in one way or another – by making you think, question, discover, cry, hold your partner, reach out . . . ? The ones that grabbed you likely also grabbed other readers. That’s literature.
I agree. A story needs depth in order to make you think (as opposed to just entertaining you).
A lot of “literary” fiction makes self-consciously aware references to other works. Allusions to Tolstoy, or references to Spinoza. This is the kind of fiction where you have to read it with explanatory notes.
Of course, a lot of “popular fiction” does this too. Poul Anderson and Fred Saberhagen used the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in their sci-fi.
Literary fiction often takes itself very seriously. You don’t as often see jokes, quips, wordplay, and the like.
Literary fiction often has a “message.” But, again, a lot of sci-fi also has a message.
Literary fiction is usually set in the real world. But there have been “literary” efforts at sci-fi, with spacecraft and aliens. Most sci-fi fans don’t care for this, just as they don’t care for “romance novels” written in sci-fi settings.
As the linked article noted, less actually happens in much literary fiction. If it involves a car-chase or a gunfight, it probably isn’t “literary.” If it involves the protagonist questioning his relationship with his father’s religious beliefs, it’s more likely to be “literary.”
Actually, I think the answer might also lay in time. What books does history remember? Some books considered literary now, Dickens’ for example, were not considered particularly literary at the time they were published.
It might also have to do with genre. Have you read The Shining? I think it’s one of the better works of American fiction written in the last 50-100 years. But you won’t catch anyone considering it literature because it’s “horror”. I’m not arguing btw that every word written by King is golden, but I do think that particular book stands above. Again, time removes a little of shame. Older books written to frighten like Jane Eyre might aspire to be “literature”.
Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace, Jane Austen, and William Shakespeare beg to differ, among many others.
Honestly, most of what we call “literature” was never intended to as something special. It’s just very good examples of genre fiction - but we often don’t have clear ideas about those genres any more. They were written to pay the bills, more or less.
That constraint isn’t as tight as you suggest. My wife and I came up with Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, and Walter M. Miller just sitting here. I’m sure we’re missing lots.
ETA: Kurt Vonnegut!
Speculative fiction has been with us as long as there has been literature:
[ul]
[li]Homer[/li][li]Chrétien de Troyes[/li][li]Geoffrey of Monmouth[/li][li]Dante Alighieri[/li][li]Thomas Malory[/li][li]William Shakespeare[/li][li]The Committees of the King James Bible[/li][li]John Milton[/li][li]John Bunyan[/li][li]Jonathan Swift[/li][li]Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley[/li][li]Lewis Carroll[/li][li]Bram Stoker[/li][li]Mark Twain[/li][li]H.G. Wells[/li][li]Robert Louis Stevenson[/li][li]Hans Christen Anderson[/li][li]Jules Vern [/li][li]Rudyard Kipling[/li][/ul]
And of course a raft of speculative fiction authors of the last hundred years or so.
That’s why I said “as often” and not “not ever.”
I’m willing to bet I’m actually correct, statistically. (But I’m damned if I’m gonna do a full-scale literature search!)
(Also, I’m not sure Shakespeare belongs. His dramas – and comedies – aren’t really in the category of “literature” as we speak of it today.)
Nabokov! Heller! Joyce! Orwell! (actually, Animal Farm may fall into both humor and fantasy) Roth! Percy! Waugh! You get the point…perhaps it was too emphatic. 
I think “literature” depends on seriousness of theme, not content, but I agree it can be complicated to combine that with humor. ETA but I do think it’s enough of a plurality to not be a good guideline.
Come to think of it, the best-selling book in English of all time is the Bible (speculative fiction, especially the psychotic horror of Revelation), the best regarded English author of all time is Shakespeare (his Tempest is delightful speculative fiction), and my personal favourite work of English Literature is Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (speculative fiction at its finest that touches the hearts of all of us!).
So there you have it. Great literature, and literary speculative fiction in particular, is about individually and collectively going into ourselves to go outside of ourselves.
My own personal definition: Literature is any work of fiction still published and widely sold a generation after the death of its author.
Many works are immensely popular in their time, and then are forgotten. They may be Great and Worthy books with an important Message about the Human Condition. They might win every award going. But if the next generation doesn’t like it, it isn’t literature.
Other books are just written for mass appeal, they might be comedy, adventure or horror, but they are loved by the next generation and the one after that, they are literature.
Are the horror stories of Edgar Allen Poe literature? Yes, definitely.
Are the horror stories of Stephen King literature? Maybe they are, I’ll tell you in 50 years.
Folks today tend to conflate literature with novels. Literature includes drama, poetry, prose (including non-fiction and fiction, the latter of which includes novels and short stories). That poetry and drama guy Shakespeare wrote in verse, which is a bit of a awkward for most folks to read today, and used late-early modern English, which is difficult for most folks to read today. Cervantes/Cerbantes (who died a day before Shakespeare) wrote the first novel in Western literature in early-modern Spanish, with the Don speaking in old Castilian, so most English readers only read him in translation. That does not mean that their works are not literature, for they are, and they are seminal works at that.
If you want to really grok what makes great literature, it’s necessary to observe how it has developed to where it is today, for authors seldom write in a vacuum. They write as part of their culture (or very often on the edges of their culture, e.g. Swift, Conrad, Rushdie), and their culture includes their literary heritage. Authors are influenced, positively or negatively, by what they have read, so if you want to get the most out of an author’s work, you’d best learn of that author’s literary and cultural background.
Monty Python is a hell of a lot more funny (if you’re willing to risk dying laughing) if you’ve read high medieval romances in your left hand, and 18th century Sterne in your right. If you want the most out of Sterne, then dig back into those romances and Cervantes. If you want the most out of Cervantes, hit those romances one more time – this time with feeling.
You see, it isn’t just what the author brings to the table that makes a work great literature. It’s also what the reader brings to the table.
Considerably ignoring the plight of those, maybe fictional themselves, let us pray so, American Religious purported to believe Jesus spoke English, one must not forget that one difference is that Lit Phds are made and won on the battlefield of Literature, and not on analyzing pulp fiction ( which is delegated to the equally valuable output of Sociological mills ).
In this vein I should like to recommend Professor Frederick Crews’ The Pooh Complex: A Freshman Casebook, a set of essays on the bear by various schools of critics.
He also wrote a sequel a decade back.
From these early phantasies we draw the plain connection, that Winnie-the-Pooh from a defensive reaction mechanism stems, employing the projective technique of inversion of affect: the feared bear becomes the loved bear, the enemy becomes the inseparable-friend. Thus in day-dream the severely phobic A. A. Milne makes a pathetic, clinically most interesting attempt, discovered by me, to deny his phobia and rid himself of his obsessive-traits. This diagnosis, as well as explaining the anxiety reduction function of many chapters in the Milne’s book, offers a general clue to further psycholiterary mysteries, as will below be seen.*
…
Let us then upon a seemingly different investigation outset, and try some word-associations on the patient. Even C. G. Jung, before his unfortunate attack of insanity in 1912, got good results from this technique. The present disadvantage, of A. A. Milne’s absence from my office, will not hamper us if we in mind keep the realization, that works of art are under conditions of relaxed superego censorship written, thus [also] yielding formerly repressed patterns almost as successfully, as private analytical sessions, lacking however the stimulating incentives of transference and very high fees. In A. A. Milne’s “fictional” memoir Winnie-the-Pooh find we a complex of key words, the which points clearly to screen memories hiding the Primal Scene and us helping to exactly the sequence of infantile-experiences reconstruct.
KARL ANSCHAUUNG, M.D [ Freudian ]
That’s almost exactly what I was going to say. Charles Dickens was the Stephen King of his day. Now he’s captial-L Literature.
Literature is good fiction that survives over time. In fifty years we’ll know which modern novels are literature.
Shakespeare and Dickens and Austin werent literary fiction. Others made them so.