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. However, the serious study of genre fiction has developed within academia in recent decades.
Characteristics
Characteristics of literary fiction generally include one or more of the following:
A focus on "introspective, in-depth character studies" of "interesting, complex and developed" characters, whose "inner stories" drive the plot, with detailed motivations to elicit "emotional involvement" in the reader.
A slower pace than popular fiction. As Terrence Rafferty notes, "literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way".
A concern with the style and complexity of the writing: Saricks describes literary fiction as "elegantly written, lyrical, and... layered".
Unlike genre fiction plot is not the central concern.
The tone of literary fiction can be darker than genre fiction.
Criticism
The distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is sometimes doubtful or controversial, because many works of genre fiction are considered works of literature. Furthermore, major writers of literary fiction, like Nobel laureateDoris Lessing, as well as Margaret Atwood, also publish science fiction. Doris Lessing described science fiction as "some of the bestsocial fiction of our time", and called Greg Bear, author of Blood Music, "a great writer". A number of major literary figures have also written either genre fiction books, or books that contain certain elements of genre fiction. For instance, the novelCrime and Punishment by Fydor Dostoevsky contains elements of the crime fiction genre. Gabriel García Márquez's book Love in the Time of Cholera is a romance novel. Frankenstein and Dracula are examples of gothichorror novels. Graham Greene at the time of his death in 1991 had a reputation as a writer of both deeply serious novels on the theme of Catholicism, and of "suspense-filled stories of detection". Acclaimed during his lifetime, he was shortlisted in 1966 for the Nobel Prize for Literature. John Banville publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black, and both Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood have written science fiction. Furthermore, Nobel laureateAndré Gide stated that Georges Simenon, best known as the creator of the fictional detectiveJules Maigret, was "the most novelistic of novelists in French literature". In an interview, John Updike lamented that "the category of 'literary fiction' has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier.... I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit". Likewise, on The Charlie Rose Show, Updike argued that this term, when applied to his work, greatly limited him and his expectations of what might come of his writing, so he does not really like it. He suggested that all his works are literary, simply because "they are written in words".
