thumb|[[Dante Meditating on the Divine Comedy. Jean-Jacques Feuchère, 1843.]]
Literary fiction—also called serious fiction, high literature, artistic literature, Literary fiction can also be called non-genre fiction and is often considered to have more artistic merit than popular genre fiction.
Some categories of literary fiction, such as historical fiction, magic realism, autobiographical novels, and encyclopedic novels, are frequently called genres without being considered genre fiction. Some authors are seen as writing literary equivalents or precursors to established genres while still maintaining the division between commercial and literary fiction. Examples include the literary romance of Jane Austen Jeff Prucher defined mainstream literature as "realistic literature... that does not belong to a marketing category (especially science fiction, fantasy or horror)"., or as an official reading list of a higher-education institution.
Robert M. Hutchins in his 1952 preface to the Great Books of the Western World declared:
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Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.
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Ben Bova, commenting on the distinction between genre and non-genre works, argued that "the literature of the fantastic was the mainstream of world storytelling from the time writing began until the beginning of the seventeenth century," and that older classics have more in common with modern fantastical genre works than with contemporary literary mainstream fiction.
China
The Classic Chinese Novels are works of fiction noted for their immense impact on Chinese culture and literature.
High culture
Literary fiction can be considered an example of "high culture" and contrasted with "popular culture" and "mass culture".
The poet and critic Matthew Arnold defined "culture" in Culture and Anarchy (1869), as "the disinterested endeavor after man's perfection," pursued and achieved through the effort to "know the best that has been said and thought in the world." This literary conception of high culture also includes philosophy. The philosophy of aesthetics has proposed high culture as a force for moral and political good.
Literary merit
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has often been awarded to authors of literary fiction. This annual award is presented to a writer from any country who has, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction. Although individual works are sometimes cited as particularly noteworthy, the award is based on an author's entire body of work.
The International Booker Prize is a similar British award given for outstanding literary fiction translated into English. This complements the original Booker Prize, which is awarded to fiction written in English. For both prizes, judges are selected from leading literary critics, writers, academics, and public figures. The Booker judging process, and the very concept of a "best book" being chosen by a small number of literary insiders, is controversial for many. Author Amit Chaudhuri wrote: "The idea that a 'book of the year' can be assessed annually by a bunch of people – judges who have to read almost a book a day – is absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honoring a writer."
Reactions
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 the term, when applied to his work, greatly limited him and his expectations of what might come of his writing, so he did not really like it. He suggested that all his works are literary simply because "they are written in words."
James Gunn noted that genre fans and critics criticize mainstream literary fiction as mundane, citing the term's "deliberate overtones of dullness, worldliness, and uninspired realism". He criticized mainstream literary fiction as becoming increasingly stagnant and marginalized.
In the context of science fiction, Brian Stableford defined literary fiction as "a tradition that had been and remained stubbornly indifferent to, if not proudly ignorant of, the progress of science." Gunn wrote, "The SF community uses the word mainstream to describe the fiction that is getting the attention they want; the word is a confession that SF is felt to be a side-stream, a tributary."
Critics and readers of mainstream literary fiction have sometimes been accused of "snobbery" for their dislike of genre fiction.
See also
- Aesthetic judgment
- Literary criticism
- Literary genre
- Literary theory
- A Reader's Manifesto
- Pop culture fiction – literature involving popular culture references and crossovers
- Postmodern literature
- The Great American Novel
- Speculative fiction
- Absurdist fiction