There's this definition that feels like "genre fiction has some recognizable theme/trope/rule/setting/whatever. Literary fiction is just the stuff that doesn't fit easily." I guess that's a fine definition. Useful! Though I think my library just calls that "fiction" or "general fiction".

But there's this other "literature makes you think" definition. That's the definition I feel like people mean when they say the word with reverence. There's some "genre is popcorn and literature is vegetables" there too. Genre is of plot driven literature character driver. Literature examines the human condition and has complex story structure.

So, like, Use of Weapons and Chasm City are just about the most scifi books to ever scifi. I'm not as into war fiction, but Catch 22 counts, right? They use they're complex narrative structure to make you feel a way. In service of their examination of war/time/identity. I dunno. Slaughterhouse Five leans on scifi to process war.

Never Let Me Go uses it's simple structure and scifi tropes to examine a very complex theme. That book is not candy.

Ender's Game taught me more about empathy than religion ever managed to.

There is certainly plot driven scifi with not great characters that's super duper scifi. Three Body Problem, 2001, Childhood's End. I don't tend to like those as much. But they sure have things to say about the human condition.

We're living in some terrible mashup of Snowcrash, The Diamond Age, Neuromancer, and The Fifth Season. And they wrote those books because they saw it coming. Or wanted to explain that I was already here. Hell, there's even the classic "we built the torment nexus from the classic book don't build the torment nexus" meme.

I'm just.... What even is literature?

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[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Good definition here:

https://writers.com/literary-fiction-vs-genre-fiction

"Now, if you ask 100 different writers about what makes literary fiction “literary,” you could easily get 100 different answers. You might hear that, opposed to genre fiction, lit fic is:

Character-driven (instead of plot driven).

Complex and thematic.

Based on real-life situations.

Focused on life lessons and deeper meanings."

and:

"Perhaps the best way to think about literary fiction is that it’s uncategorizable. Unlike genre fiction, which can be broken down even further into different types of fiction genres, lit fic doesn’t fall neatly into any of the genre boxes. Some literary fiction examples include To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens."

I'd argue that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is in the "Legal Fiction" genre, along with the Perry Mason books and the John Grisham novels, but "Legal Fiction" isn't a category you find in bookstores. 😉