What Is Genre Fiction?

Personally I think that people make a distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction simply because they are being snobby. They are all simply genres of fiction and in fact I would argue that in a lot of cases so-called literary fiction should just be put into some other category.

I think most people use the term to describe what they think of as "good" fiction. I've even heard people use it to describe The Lord of the Rings, because the prose in that is very ornate and the characters are developed quite a bit.

But I just don't think it works to classify some works as literary, just because you think they have lasting power.

I know that Moby Dick has lasted a long time, but it was panned when it first came out and a lot of people hate it now as well. So who gets to say that it is literary, rather than just a revenge story or a sea story?

It's a useless category in my opinion.

@pastanaga - I think the line can be blurry however, between the two types of genres and when they are perfectly mated together you generally end up with a classic book.

Jane Austen's novels, for example, might be considered romance, or, nowadays, historical fiction, but they are exquisitely written, and so have survived longer than the romances of her peers.

Likewise with Oscar Wilde's novels. His were various genres like comedy and even fantasy, but most people today would consider them to be literary, because of their beautiful style of writing.

Modern examples of people who straddle the lines are Margret Atwood, who has written several science fiction novels that are usually found in the literary section, and Barbara Kingsolver's books. They are as engrossing as a Dan Brown thriller but they are usually placed among literary novels.

The way I've always liked to define the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction, is that genre fiction is more concerned with telling a good story, while literary fiction is more concerned with the way the story is told.

Obviously, both types of fiction prefer to have a good story and both types prefer to have an engaging way of telling the story.

You can't just say that if something magical happens in the story it's a fantasy story now, because there is magical realism, which is when something 'magical' happens in a literary novel.

Life of Pi, for example, I would call magical realism (although it depends on how you interpret the book) but I wouldn't call it fantasy. I would call it literary fiction.

You might say that everything should be equally concerned with the story and the method of telling, but when you think about how difficult it can be to read some literary novels, you realize that dense and symbolic prose isn't always what people want to read. Sometimes they just want a plain thriller.