What Is Literary Fiction?

 I keep thinking most of my stuff is literary fiction - even if I am not exactly a literary type. With the reception my stuff is getting (check out the posts under the subject Literary Magazine for where I have posted my rejection letters), maybe I am fooling myself.

Writer's Digest answers my question with its article What Is Literary Fiction?

Literary fiction is less of a genre than it is a category, which makes defining it difficult, but you know it when you read it.

For a general understanding, literary fiction focuses on style, character, and theme over plot—unlike most genre and commercial fiction. This means that literary fiction is not beholden to certain tropes or genre expectations to be considered lit fic, but that also means it can feature elements of any genre and still be categorized as lit fic. Lit fic can be suspenseful and shocking, sweeping and romantic, sarcastic and cynical … you name it, there’s a literary fiction novel that’s got it.

Okay, so I am not delusional about the genre. Whether its good literary fiction I am writing is a different story. (Pun intended.)

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And consider, Tomás Nevinson by Javier Marías review – the final mystery which makes this point:

It is one of many quotations and allusions in this book. “Literary fiction” is generally an otiose phrase – tautological and imprecise – but it fits Marías’s work exactly. Nevinson was in a bookshop in Oxford reading Little Gidding when Tupra’s trap snapped shut on him. Decades later, TS Eliot is still one of his most constant references, along with Marlowe, Baudelaire, Di Lampedusa, Wilfred Owen and – most insistently – Shakespeare. Taunted by Tupra, Nevinson defends himself with a line from Macbeth. He is confident Tupra knows the play by heart, “like any truly cultivated murderer”. Tupra learned his craft from the Kray twins, who probably didn’t have much Shakespearean tragedy on the tips of their tongues, but Marías is not mirroring reality. He is weaving a many-layered meditation on mortality and memory and free will and its opposite.

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