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Originally Posted by OneandonlyDoc
Am I the only writer that gets the heeby-jeebies when I see the term "literature"?
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Probably not, which I think is a shame. Margret Atwood says the same about genre fiction, even though she
writes genre fiction. I think it's as much a mistake to dismiss literary fiction as a monolithic whole as it is to dismiss genre fiction--especially when so many amazing writers fit equally well in both places. Jorge Luis Borges, for example. Absolutely literary. Absolutely fantasy.
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I don't write what the marketplace, critics, and scholars would consider literature.
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I probably don't either, but while there may be a large statistical blob in the middle of those groups, I don't think the definition of literature is anywhere near unanimous. At its broadest, literary fiction just means that writing style and "presentation" are at least as important as the other aspects of story.
Sure, the stories tend to be smaller and more introspective, but not always.
A Tale of Two Cities (I'm trying to remember what I read in tenth grade) isn't a small-scale story and Victor Hugo's
Notre-Dame de Paris is an incredibly immersive job of world-building--equal to, say,
Dune in that respect.