Talk:Literary fiction

(untitled) Literary vs. popular and genre

One of my sons and a "Lit major" friend at work sneer at the mention of contemporary authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Tony Hillerman, and even John Grisham, all of whom I enjoy reading. My son, in particular, likes Twain, Dickens, Doesteyevsky, Tolstoy, etc. and falls asleep every night with the light on trying to pursue a few more of their pages.

I recently heard the tail end of an NPR talk show, probably Fresh Air, with an author (help me here if you can) trying to resurrect Sherlock Holmes, who said the boundaries among various types of fiction should be erased and that his own writing WAS literary and not merely genre.

Looking at the definitions here of Literary vs Popular and Genre fiction, I seem to be feeling a bit of a literary inferiority complex. Much of what I see on the "Bestseller" racks seems to be "genre" of one sort or another.

So in an attempt to "Pull myself up by the fictional bootstraps", who should I be reading among todays authors if I want to be open to "Literary fiction?" Or am I so far gone I'm doomed to remain a literate low-brow?

I'm supposed to say 'Martin Amis', I think. I don't actually read him, though. I do read W. G. Sebald. Think Paul Auster, also. Charles Matthews 19:04, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It is all genre. "Genre" is just a perjorative term. Literature wasn't better in the past, it is just that there is a bias because people no longer read the mediocre works of the past. --RLent 21:47, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

sure, but literature is not confined to the past. There is plenty of contemporary work which easily fits into this category. You don't have to be dead to write literature, but you do have to get past the gatekeepers if you want anyone beyond your own circle to read it as such. Sigma-6 10:53, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Head... meet desk. "Literature" is a REALLY broad term, which, coincidentally, includes such banal things as ad brochures. Anyone who can read or write can write "literature", by definition. There are no "gatekeepers" to being lauded by people for reasons other than being a good page-turner, either. Either people in academia and such read and analyze your work a lot, or they don't; and either your work has a lasting effect despite being only written presumably for your own time, or it doesn't. Dickens wasn't intending to be read by scholars, and neither was Twain. "Good fiction" will always be subjective, and nobody can predict with 100% certainty what scholars will love 25 years down the road. And, I'd like to add that the more a person's work gets "respected" by critics, the less likely their genres of choice are actually to be labeled anything but "literary", even if they write, say, science fiction or fantasy. Whoever said "genre is a pejorative term" wasn't too far off the mark; how many people actually saw a news organization list Kurt Vonnegut as a writer who ever so much as touched science fiction, for example? Runa27 01:20, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

I dunno, Don Quixote and The Iliad aren't exactly what I'd call a "page turner". But once I was done reading them, they were much better novels than "The Da Vinci Code" (actually, it took me almost forever to finish that piece of crap anyway.) Commercial fiction is often written with no other intent than to commercialize and sell books. That's why it's named that. And the writers of the past who did that aren't remembered. Neither will Stephen King or Dan Brown be remembered. Because their work is fluff and meaningless. Now, you may take me as a highbrow for suggesting that popularity and readibility aren't the only measures of quality. But a thousand works of great literature that were ignored in their time and lauded afterwards, who were outsold by talentless hacks, prove you wrong. 74.251.38.22 (talk) 09:09, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree with just about everyone else that this article needs to be rewritten ASAP. It's dreadful. I'm particularly startled at the obtuseness of this claim: "[Literary fiction] lacks any kind of genre conventions. One would be hard-pressed to come up with a list of genre conventions." Um, no I wouldn't. I agree with the folks who are arguing that contemporary academic literary fiction as currently practiced is a genre (and is actually among the most rigidly formulaic of genres). One of my friends read submissions for a campus literary magazine, and he reports that the overwhelming majority of the stories submitted were about male English professors having affairs with female undergrads. That's not a formula? Off the top of my head, here are some of the conventions of literary fiction (particularly short fiction): 1) The piece will be contemporary social realism, 2) The protagonist will be an ordinary person, 3) The protagonist will be self-absorbed and self-pitying, 4) The protagonist will not get along with others in his or her social network, 5) The protagonist will spend a great deal of time thinking about the past, 6) The protagonist will come to an epiphany in which he or she grasps the essential truth of his or her situation, 7) The ending will be ambiguous, 8) The prose style will be cool and detached. Obviously not all literary fiction hits all of these points (just as not all science fiction is set in the future), but enough of it does to identify a few conventions, surely. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 171.66.153.173 (talk) 14:25, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Why is most of this article literary fiction about genre fiction? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.85.172.6 (talk) 20:33, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Probably because there is also an article on literature. Perhaps this article should be merged with that one? Rwood128 (talk) 11:50, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

The idea of a merge has already been discussed below. Note that this article is about "a term used in the book-trade to distinguish fiction that is regarded as having literary merit from most commercial or "genre" fiction".

Division

In the article, 'literary fiction' is said to be broadly distinguishable from genre or popular fiction because the former deals more with character, style and psychology, while the latter focuses on narrative and plot. Is there a source for this assertion? I had always considered that the distinction was merely a matter first of the novelty or poignancy of a work and second of market. It's just a personal opinion, but as it stands right now the article seems to state little more — I don't even see an appeal to common consensus in the statement as it stands. Wally 08:27, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree. There is an issue here with source material. I think perhaps a good look at literary criticism would be a good idea. Sigma-6 10:53, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Sources??

Is it worth it to try to tone down the POV/OR a little bit, or is it a hopeless case that no one cares about anyway. Adding sources for something other than the Updike quote would help quite a bit. But..."somewhat uneasy"? This is encyclopedic? Dybryd 17:15, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Prejudice

To me, this article seems biased. To assert that characterisation is better than plot is a matter of personal oppinion is relative, and to assert that any authors who think otherwise must therefore be only interested in money, and not value writeing as art is prejudiced. Plot is as much a part of the story as characterisation and peoples views of relative values of storiy element vary and those who prefer plot can clearly appreciate stories as art or why would they buy them), so why can't they reate them as art?
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.50.228.5 (talk • contribs) 09:30, 13 February 2007‎ (UTC)

I'm not convinced that you're seeing what this article says about that. The issue perhaps, is part of the old discussion of esthetic merit as it relates to cultural elitism. I'm certainly not a professional in this field, but I am under the impression that the point made here is not so much a value judgment as something like the distinction between academic and commercial art. You're certainly right that discussions of the relative merits of either when they're put in contrast with each other tends to descend into opinion, but it's long been a subject of debate whether any esthetic judgment is objective.

I don't think that the writer of this article asserted that characterization was 'better' than plot, so much as that the one type of fiction tended to focus on the one and the other on the other. On the other hand, is T. S. Eliot a better poet than . . . say . . . William McGonagall? Absolutely. Even if, in a hypothetical world, a McGonagall's work sells well and has a market, and an Eliot's doesn't.

There are objective criteria. Clearly (I'm willing to state this categorically) a literary professor familiar with the Western Canon is going to be a better judge of a work of fiction than the reader who only reads the Harlequins at the corner grocer, and it could be argued (and often is) that there is a certain elitism in that, since we are, after all, talking about art . . . but I submit that if two published authors, one a physicist and the other a soldier, both write nonfiction work about wave-particle duality, you're going to have to go with the one over the other as regards scientific accuracy, whether you understand the topic or not, and regardless of whose work is considered a saleable book.

No they are not objective. Your example is flawed. With non-fiction, reality is the judge, not humans. If I wrote a book about ballistics, the test would be if a cannon ball, fired under the specified conditions, hit the target. If it does, the book is a good description of ballistics. If not, the book should be discarded. If I write a book about the behavior of bees, the test would be to see if bees really do behave like this. The only gatekeeper is reality, humans can merely observe whether this book corresponds to reality. With fiction, it is utterly different. We have people who can claim to be gatekeepers, but it means nothing. There are some books which we would generally say are better that other books, but it is subjective. Literature does not stand apart from other written works. Just look at how many works were not appreciated in their day. Were the so-called gatekeepers wrong, and if so, then why should we trust them if they cannot be counted upon to be able to recognize good literature?--RLent (talk) 18:05, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

There is these days, I think, a place we won't go in terms of art. We don't want to think it's inaccessible, so we can't allow the existence of gatekeepers. On the other hand, there certainly are such things as good and bad art, regardless of what the sales figures are. A work of literature is simply a work of enduring importance to humanity. It's nothing less than that, and for that reason, it can be genre fiction, and it can even be poorly written. All it needs to be is indelibly etched into the cultural consciousness of the species. Which should be easy, right?

History decides that, more than anything else. . . Is that elitist, that most of what is written throughout history doesn't make it into the canon? Maybe. There's definitely a cultural bias, but then, every culture has its canon, and that can't be avoided. The fact is, it's extremely difficult to deliberately write literature, but it's comparatively easy to write bad books that sell; though in actual fact, neither is a cakewalk. Elitism or not, that's something you can't avoid, IMO.

Perhaps read: Western Canon and get a sense from there what the difference is. You can't really put a lot of modern commercial authors beside Homer, for example.

That page has this link on it, which I think tries to get to the heart of it. [1] Sigma-6 10:53, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

You know, Sigma-6... I'm sure you can find a better piece to support some of your assertions than the second link you gave, which begins with the following:

The lowest common denominator question in relation to the Great Books debate, asked with a whining impatience by a mostly nonexistent public (which is to say the terminally "not interested" public, the severe and profoundly distracted public), is, "Are the Great Books great or not?" But this, of course, is a television question. This is what Kathy would have asked Regis or Oprah asks her adoring audience, wide-eyed with sincerity. This is, in short, the sort of thing that inquiring minds want to know. Nonetheless, I for one am happy to answer that, yes, the great works were and are great, whatever that means, and it means very little, a good old-fashioned tautology is what it is, just the sort of tautology that made this country great.

But, as we should know, there is another question that needs to be asked, a question that takes us beyond tautology. The question is: of what does the greatness of the great works consist? Hearing this question, you can feel North America's inquiring minds go, "Uh-oh," in anticipation that this is the sort of question that opens the door to just the people they don't want to hear from, who also happen to be just the people whose professional responsibility it is to answer the question: professors. For this is not only an aesthetic question, it is an epistemological question. How do we know what we think we know about the beautiful and the great? Uh-oh, indeed.

I am not a fan of the usually-vapid Oprah-style shows in any way, and also consider myself to be an intelligent person, who, having generally (according to the standardized pedagogical analysis tests they constantly subjected us to back in K-12) outpaced her peers in reading skills by at least two years... and I find that piece to be obnoxiously condescending; unnecessarily condescending, at that. And it also ignores the oft-neglected fact that we make people study these works not because they're full of very pretty sets of words, but in fact because they're culturally significant (The Scarlet Letter is an excellent example; by modern standards it has far too much exposition and the prose is too florid, but the writing style isn't the reason we appreciate it today; instead, it is the cultural influence and examination of human nature that is most important). Not because we need to ask "how do we know what we think we know about the beautiful and the great", in other words, but because it's a historically important novel, it examines human nature, and aspects of it are still frequently referenced today. The "aesthetic" is secondary. I wish I could say that it seemed to me like most teachers forced to convince kids to read Great Books knew better, and knew to respond to the "but it's so painful to read, it's all melodramatic and flowery - why are we even reading this junk?" complaints with "because it's referenced all over the place today and has an interesting examination of human psychology once you get past all the purple prose", instead of "because you're going to be tested on it next week and the school board says you have to learn it and it's a Great Book". Sadly, I've yet to run across a teacher who actually thought to take that tack, and had to discover the "because other people reference it/it has some interesting stuff behind the purple" motivations for myself. I feel sorry for all my schoolmates who were subjected to Great Books without realizing why they were supposed to learn them. But anyway, that's why I say the quoted portion is far too condescending; because it sort of assumes (or implies) that anyone that doesn't immediately like Great Books is basically a member of the Stupid Unwashed Masses Incapable of Appreciating Art and must be dealt as such... as opposed to simply coming from a culture that has a distaste and impatience for that style of writing and a desire to receive and process information at a faster clip (also, the use of "this is a television question" is not only childish-sounding, but insulting to any modern, intelligent media consumer who has bothered to read Everything Bad Is Good for You; not all television is as vapid or useless as Oprah, yet he clearly likes to think it's universally anti-intellectual crap, as opposed to simply a different medium for information and art of certainly no less varying quality than prose writing in general). I'm not saying he doesn't have something perfectly legitimate to say, but he really is extremely condescending in the way he presents his argument, and it takes a third paragraph for him to admit that yes, actually asking "what makes Great Books great" is perfectly legitimate, after two paragraphs of seemingly lambasting people for doing just that. A particularly ostentatious and useless peacock ruffling its feathers in an attempt to prove it is better than all the other birds.

However, lest you think I'm doing nothing but complain about your post (because I'm really not trying to complain about you so much as only one of your choice of links, for presentational and not content reasons)... the link to Western Canon, despite the brevity of the article, was an excellent choice, and I'm glad you pointed it out. This article could learn a thing or two about focus, context, and NPOV from the Western Canon article! Runa27 19:25, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Runa27, I dub thee an "anti-literary elitist". Hah. 74.251.38.22 (talk) 09:15, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Going back and reading it now (having just filled my head with John Cage), I completely agree with you. That quoted portion seems to me precisely as you describe it. I might have been better off going with Marshall McLuhan, now that I think about it--though the piece I'd quote really just steps a little more lightly in the same places . . . and the gendered language is . . . well, gendered:

"The percussed victims of the new technology have invariably muttered cliches about the impracticality of artists and their fanciful preferences. But in the past century it has come to be generally acknowledged that, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, 'The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.' Knowledge of this simple fact is now needed for human survival. The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old. Equally age old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot sidestep the new violence, to recognize their need of the artist. To reward and make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness."

Better? Worse? Off-point? I think that's a pretty good description (as distant and 'over the shoulder' as it might be) of what so-called 'great work' (in any field) consists of. These days I'm wondering more and more if it's worth the effort to even try and identify it, because it really ought to be self-evident. Your point about education is well taken too. To distance myself from that link (which I do think was a poor choice. . . apologies) I don't (personally) love great books because they allow me to allude and quote and reference and generally throw things over people's heads, but rather for the same reason I wanted to study the history of architecture (surface-scratching as my study might be). . . When I walk into a Cathedral, or another great building, I want to become intimate with that intense feeling of being overwhelmed by a human accomplishment. It's just not the same with Grisham and Cussler and the Oprah book club. War and Peace may be a long read, but it's effing dense, and it's exquisitely crafted and heartwrenchingly beautiful; it's made by someone who cared so much about what they were crafting that they threw their heart, soul, and fourteen years of their life to get it *just so*. Cussler, on the other hand, is a half-baked commercial hack who doesn't even *pretend* to understand his own times, and doesn't seem to demonstrate any interest in doing so. If I'm an elitist for valuing one more than the other, then I'm an elitist. Personally, what *I'm* impatient with (as a member of that generation that wants to process information at a faster clip and is impatient with that purple style of writing) is anything that's boringly typical--anything that openly and unapologetically displays its creator's lack of interest in exceeding him/herself. I admit that that's a personal interest though, and that I'm editorializing (sorry), and that I do deliberately read a lot of bad stuff because of the social value. Sigma-6 (talk) 03:34, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Sigma-6, you do realize, don't you? that the descriptions of "great art" you give in your last (long) paragraph are highly subjective? SpectrumDT (talk) 18:59, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, of course I do. Needless to say. Isn't it better to get your biases in the open than to try and conceal them in a cloud of high-flown, pretended objectivity? When it comes to trying to figure out how to write an article like this one, that's pretty close to being The Problem, isn't it? Sigma-6 (talk) 04:20, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

POV

Statements like "does not fit my personal definition", "I think it lacks the cohesion" and "I would be hard pressed" are blatantly POV unless they are quotes from someone that haven't been designated as such and properly attributed and sourced.--209.7.195.158 (talk) 16:33, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. This article is ridiculously bad. 128.195.223.168 (talk) 17:58, 5 May 2008 (UTC).

Surely the idea of the term as a genre definition only applies to its modern sense and a particular cluster of modern texts and their production and reception. I don't think, therefore, that it needs to cohesively describe Beckett, High Victorianism, etc, as well. The Victorians had their own version and idea of 'literary fiction.' We've simply given ours a blunt designation. I think that sentence should be removed or substantially altered to be less ahistorical. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.56.69.87 (talk) 08:15, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Prose fiction redirect

Wouldn't the more appropriate target for Prose fiction be the present article? __meco (talk) 15:30, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Rewrite crucial

As an article covering such an important subject, this is desperately in need of being rewritten by editors more knowledgeable on the subject. Is there some way we can call more immediate attention to this? .Absolution. (talk) 10:06, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Three years later there is some activity at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Literature, a group that calls this "High-importance" according to its project banner above. That page is also linked to the banner (select "discussion"), as for every wikiproject.

I wonder what share of all "High" importance articles are also "Stub" class?

--P64 (talk) 18:27, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

no way do I claim expertise (other than having read a lot of LF, and tried to write it) but I've separated the characteristics of LF from the definition (which IMO is too discursive to be a good definition) and bulleted them. I've also annotated the contentious claim that plot isn't important to LF. If I had to put it in one sentence, it would be that LF is concerned about characters as well as plot. Anyway, if you don't like it, revert it! Chrismorey (talk) 22:38, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

PS, US and British definitions seem to differ, in the trade anyway - in US, almost anything not pure genre is classed as literary, the Brits expect it to be more highbrow. Just my personal observation Chrismorey (talk) 22:38, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Merge?

Is this article really needed? I'm trying to see how it might possibly be improved/expanded and am led into thinking that it should be merged with Literature, or possibly the Western canon. Rwood128 (talk) 22:00, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Or Fiction –––– I have added material from this article to Fiction. Rwood128 (talk) 17:03, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

IMO it merits keeping: (1) it's a recognised genre in the book trade; (2) it's controversial, therefore merits more discussion than a dictionary definition. There are different meanings, in particular US usage seems to apply it to all non-genre, non-escapist fiction whereas the definition given feels more like a Brit one Chrismorey (talk) 22:19, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Chrismorey for the most useful comments. There is of course within genre fiction works of high literary merit, to confuse the issue further. Major literary figures have written science fiction, for example, like Nobel laureate Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood and in detective fiction there is George Simenon:

Ned Rorem, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, author and longtime French expatriate, said in a telephone interview last week from his Nantucket, Mass., home that Simenon is ``one of the five greatest French writers of our century.`` Rorem placed Simenon in the company of Proust, Gide, Cocteau and Sartre. Gide once called him ``the most novelistic of novelists in French literature.

And academia has gradually recognised this fact. Rwood128 (talk) 13:27, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. The idea that genre fiction ipso facto lacks literary merit is a false and pernicious one Chrismorey (talk) 20:39, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Anyone mind me removing the template? It seems we've come to a consensus? Wolfdog (talk) 13:21, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

It's interesting that we don't have "literary poetry", but just good or bad poetry; and the same is for drama. Rwood128 (talk) 10:26, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

It still seems to me that this topic would be better served if it was merged into the Literature article. Rwood128 (talk) 16:09, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

References

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Point of View

This article is written from the point of view of someone defending genre vs literary fiction. This is not a neutral tone. The bulk of the first section is justifying the literary qualities of genre.

The article was written previously from the point of view of someone trying to dismiss the literary qualities of genre fiction. Now it is more neutral.James343e (talk) 14:53, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

The article was more balanced than you claim.

There is just good and bad writing. But isn't it possible that poor quality genre fiction can still make money? I like science fiction but I very selective. Likewise publishers tend to reject good writing that they don't see as commercial. Publisher also cut and slash novels that are too long to be commercial, or too violent or sexually explicit in the past. Rwood128 (talk) 15:34, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

I think the article is balanced just fine considering how contentious this term truly is. As stated above, it’s been changed from a POV that demeaned genre fiction to a more balanced one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WesPhil (talk • contribs) 22:12, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Definition

The opening sentence of the lede badly needs improvement. A better definition is needed. Possibly old Nobel speeches could be a useful source? Rwood128 (talk) 16:33, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Right now, I think the lead sentence is good because it includes a resumed version of the definition form Saricks that is employed later in the body of the text.James343e (talk) 19:18, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Writers and academia

I think that there is a problems with the sentence about literary writers being employed by universities. I know of numerous local published poets who were university professors, but that job came first in all cases. I know of several writers of fiction: one is a free lance editor, one is a university librarian, two are now retired professors, who wrote as a hobby, and a deceased professor, who had tried to be a full-time writer {supported by his wife), but he got his job before ever being published. Other local writers may get work teaching creative writing, or as writers in residence for a year, both of which they would be qualified for. I know of two other locals who work in film and TV. When I google this topic I learn that most writers struggle and if they win a major literary prize that goes toward paying off debt. I imagine, however, that a successful literary author is more likely to be employed to teach creative writing than a writer of romance novels, but a citation is needed here, not my personal opinion. Rwood128 (talk) 18:55, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

You can delete all that sentence if you think is too generic and problematic. James343e (talk) 19:21, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

I deleted it to avoid confussions.James343e (talk) 19:34, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Rwood128 (talk) 20:55, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

The first two sentences in this article seem very stupid.

This article begins as follows:

Literary fiction is a category of fiction that explores any facet of the human condition, and may involve social commentary. Generally speaking, literary fiction is regarded as having more literary merit than genre fiction, especially the most commercially oriented type of genre fiction.

I wonder how intelligent people can take something like that seriously. I seems to imply that if a work of fiction is firmly and emphatically within some particular genre, then it does not explore any facet of the human condition or involve social commentary.

That is absurd and imbecilic and probably dishonest.

I would have guessed that literary fiction is fiction that lends itself to being read not merely to enjoy the story but to savor the artful way in which it is written, either in the use of language, or the profound nature of something in its content, or perhaps other things. In this I am probably influenced by having read C. S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, and it could easily be that I am wrong since I don't know much about this, but I can't believe that that opening passage of this article makes sense. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:12, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

This article probably should be merged with Fiction (but see above). Rwood128 (talk) 00:23, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

Genres are marketing categories, if a work of fiction had actual artistic merit it wouldn't be sold under a marketing category it would just be sold as literary fic. Why do you think Handmaid's Tale or House of Leaves are in general fiction instead of SFF? Orchastrattor (talk) 19:39, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

What is the subject of this article?

Is this an article on literary fiction, genre fiction, or both? The weight of the article seems to rest on genre fiction and seems to be written by genre fans trying to validate genre fiction.

See "Merge" and other discussion above.Rwood128 (talk) 13:32, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Non-essentials and essentials

This article now begins as follows:

Literary fiction is a term used in the book-trade to distinguish novels that are regarded as having literary merit, from most commercial or "genre" fiction. However, the boundaries are not fixed, and major literary figures have employed the genres of science fiction, crime fiction, romance, etc, to create works of literature.

Given the acknowledgement that literary fiction and fiction within a genre are not mutually exclusive, why not try a definition that identifies what is essential, thus:

Literary fiction is a term used in the book-trade to refer to novels that are regarded as having literary merit.

After that, one could say something about its relationships to genre fiction and commercial fiction, without treating comments about "distinguishing" it from them as essential to the concept. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:29, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Michael Hardy is my revision, especially "generally regarded", acceptable? By many? Some? Rwood128 (talk) 10:22, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

@Rwood128: Much better! Michael Hardy (talk) 16:22, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

@Rwood128: Although have have qualms about saying "...is a term".

The giraffe (Giraffa) is a term used to refer to an African artiodactyl mammal, the tallest living terrestrial animal and the largest ruminant.

The giraffe (Giraffa) is an African artiodactyl mammal, the tallest living terrestrial animal and the largest ruminant.

There are times when "is a term" is appropriate, but often it's better omitted. (My composite parody of various solecisms in new Wikipedia articles is this:

well Basically, a giraffe is a term used by zoolooloogists to refer to when an animal has a long neck living the planes of eastern and southern Africa, which eats leafs.

Michael Hardy (talk) 16:33, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Proposition for shifting what literary fiction is considered in the article.

The talk page dates very far back, and, thus, and central idea is not established. I feel the article itself reflects that genre and literary fiction are not two distinct things, but interlinked things. I don’t believe all genre non conforming books are literary fiction just the same as not all genre books. And books within a genre shouldn’t be considered so boldly as “lower art” or lesser literature. This idea seems to be insinuated in the article with minimal support. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WesPhil (talk • contribs) 22:32, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

I mean this article needs some serious work. One author from 2009 is used in nearly five different citations in the first section describing literary fiction. I don’t see how genre fiction only focuses on plot and can’t be focused on human conditions or political criticism. The article from here treats genre and literary as two separate things when they really aren’t. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WesPhil (talk • contribs) 22:35, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

I'll take a further look at this. Rwood128 (talk) 12:06, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, it does appear that the body of the article needs revising.Rwood128 (talk) 21:46, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

I also tend to agree more with your revision revision to the citation I initially removed. I still think broadly labeling literature in such a way needs a source with a consensus view from scholars. I think the current citation could fall under “original research” errors. Still an improvement. Overall the biggest improvement to the article would be to find recent scholarly consensus on the issue. As an example of logical errors I see here, a book that is written outside of any established genre could be awful and not artistic at all, while a book written within genre bounds could easily be artistically written. So genre doesn’t exclude literary. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WesPhil (talk • contribs) 16:14, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Name

I've added two synonyms here - mainstream fiction or non-genre fiction - which I believe discuss the same topic. I wonder if one of them wouldn't be a more clear name, as "literary fiction" seems very generic and ambigious. Thoughts? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:27, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

"Mainstream fiction" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Mainstream fiction and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 September 24#Mainstream fiction until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 11:46, 24 September 2022 (UTC)