What exactly is 'Literary Fiction'?
Four definitions of the literary
It doesn’t matter what is or isn’t literary fiction, and it’s all-important. It doesn’t matter because books are books and the process of becoming a discerning reader is learning to navigate across genres and through marketing smokescreens to find the good stuff. It’s all-important because endlessly reified genre categories shape not only our consumption of art and media, but also what gets produced and promoted.
So in honor of every reader’s favorite semantic debate, here’s an attempt to segment out the tangible things we mean1 when we describe fiction as ‘literary.’ We usually don’t mean all of these things at the same time (especially the fourth one), but these are the cardinal directions in which the phrase ‘literary fiction’ points.
1) Literary fiction is a marketing category
‘Literary fiction’ is the fiction that’s shelved in the literary fiction section of the bookstore. It’s what Amazon recommends to you if you read a preview of the latest prize winner. It’s what you read to authenticate to others that you read literary fiction, which is literary fiction because the publishing industry and the larger literary complex have said that it’s literary fiction. Publishing is a business, and whatever businesses aim towards the public is at least partly marketing.
’Pure marketing’ is probably the safest, most pragmatic definition of literary fiction. You always sound wised-up when you point out where the marketing bullshit is in any given thing. I don’t think this definition, by itself, solves the problem of what we actually mean when we use the term ‘literary,’ but it’s a key part of the puzzle. You can’t talk astutely about any cultural phenomenon in 2025 without teasing out the element of marketing—or you can use a more contemporary phrase such as ‘algorithms,’ which points in the same direction.
2) Literary fiction stakes a claim to cultural capital
John Guillory once defined ‘literature’ as ‘the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie.’ He was writing in the context of the academic Canon Wars of the Eighties and Nineties. So as I understand it (admittedly without having read the whole book), he was talking about the way in which the old-order literary canon (the Great Books) constituted a way of stockpiling and selectively distributing power, prestige, status. Thirty years on, we understand that the Great Books are not the only repositories of literature-driven cultural capital. We all recognize the cultural capital-centric mode of reading from watching ourselves and others flex about having read not only The Iliad and Middlemarch but also Infinite Jest and Flights.
He wasn’t talking about exactly the same thing, but I’m reminded here of Jonathan Franzen’s essay about ‘contract fiction versus status fiction.’ Franzen says of the way status fiction presents itself:
[T]he best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it.
His case study for this argument is The Recognitions by William Gaddis, which like, fair enough. That book Makes Claims.
Not every novel that tries to stake a claim to cultural capital has to be a tome that’s difficult to read. But we do often use ‘literary’ as a status term. The crime novels or fantasy novels or other ‘genre fiction’ that are deemed most aesthetically accomplished get elevated to the ‘literary’ heights of their genre. As time passes, some of them—Kurt Vonnegut, Patricia Highsmith—get shelved as ‘classics’ alongside Tolstoy and the Brontës.
The claiming of this cultural-capital status, and whether it’s conferred, is a mystifying process that changes over time. Fifty years ago, you’d have had a hard time finding a tenured academic in the United States who would ratify the literary value2 of Ursula K. LeGuin. Today, you’d have a much harder time finding one who would not. It’s enough to say that plenty of writers and books have these aspirations.
3) Literary fiction has aesthetic qualities that reward analysis
Here I’m taking inspiration from two (or really three) very good critics. Christian Lorentzen in a great essay:
Literary writing is any writing that rewards critical attention. It’s writing that you want to read and to read about. It’s something different from entertainment. It involves aesthetic and political judgments and it’s not easily quantifiable.
And here’s Stefan Collini, in another great piece in which he happens to be reviewing, quoting from, and building upon Guillory:
‘The study of literature is a rational procedure for what can be known about an object’ (the literary work). This is a cognitive enterprise, and it centres on the study of writing that is ‘sufficiently wrought’ for the writing itself to be of interest.
This is my favorite definition of ‘literary.’ I love the idea that the crux of it all is that certain novels are simply more deserving of particular attention. I love the idea that this merit is hard-won, and that it’s instantiated at micro and macro levels in the text. It’s both a romantic way of looking at fiction, and one that we can’t avoid if we believe fiction is worth reading not only as entertainment, but as a deeper project of inquiry and edification. You have to rely on on your own aesthetic and intellectual judgements and those of others to parse what fits into this category, and that can be scary, but in a way it’s all that matters to an earnest reader.
Of the three definitions of ‘literary [fiction]’ I’ve offered so far, one is more or less not debatable: ‘Literary fiction’ is obviously a marketing category. The other two definitions lead into labyrinths of interrogation and argumentation. What does it mean to lay claim to ‘cultural capital’ and the attendant status? What writing is ‘of interest’ and ‘rewards critical attention’? Great questions. You could spend a lifetime sorting them out, not least because the underlying facts will always be changing. There are worse ways to spend your time.
4) Literary fiction is (too often) a skinsuit worn by cynical, shoddy, faddish bullshit that seeks to trick you by declaring its respectability
You know who you are and you know what you did.
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Calvin and Hobbes Corner
Reviving this segment because it turns out I can use this site to access and link the comics.
We’re making a mockery of the assignment:
And so we reach the melancholy denouement of the leaf-collecting arc. Calvin made contact with space aliens and still ended up flunking the assignment. A literally cosmic injustice. As is so often the case, no one believed him. And as is so often Watterson’s particular alchemy, we as the audience are caught between knowing what ‘really’ happened and the fact that our point of view is Calvin’s imagination.
Calvin’s dream that a teacher might admit that an assignment is ‘pointless’ gets carried forward into the adult fantasy that something we might able to talk a boss or client into understanding the silliness of what they’ve asked us to do. It never works out that way, but we keep hoping.
But the comic doesn’t land on that note. Calvin is yet again the fool. He could have just done his homework, and if he had, he probably wouldn’t be handling poison sumac. Here’s Watterson’s gentle Stoicism: It might be better to just do the thing, rather than to have lofty theories about it or try to turn into a grandiose adventure.
A Poem
Jarad Bruinstroop is watching a silent film.
To be clear, I’m not saying every book that gets called literary has, in some ontological sense, these four qualities. I’m referring to what we say when we use terms like ‘literary fiction.’ I’m trying to tease out the distinct strands of meaning and examine them on their own. We can mean all of them at the same time, or one at a time, or whatever. But I’d argue that we generally imply at least one of these four definitions when we describe something as ‘literary fiction.’
That the term ‘literary value’ can be used more or less interchangeably with terms such as ‘aesthetic value’ and ‘cultural value’ is also a dead give away about the inescapability of the cultural-capital definition.
Holy shit you finished the C&H arc. The haters and losers said it would never be done.