Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
That was not my intention. It's what I write, and most of the time it's what I read.
Genres exist because certain standards/conventions/traditions have evolved that categorise the results - not perfectly but enough that most resellers use recognisably similar sets of genre names. In general, what doesn't fit into commonly recognised genres is either called a mash-up or gets lumped into "Literary" fiction.
My own definition of Literary fiction is fiction in which the rules of genre are set aside (or not followed as assiduously as normal). As I mentioned earlier, I think an author takes additional risks when choosing to write Literary fiction, because the rules of the various genres help to keep your work in a form that readers are familiar with and are prepared to enjoy.
None of this makes genre fiction necessarily easier to write or of a lesser quality than Literary fiction, but by definition it does make it conventional (to a greater or lesser extent).
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This rule breaking characteristic is missing from most (but not all) definitions of literary fiction which I come across. Certainly I doubt that a work of genre fiction becomes literary fiction solely because it fails to conform to all of the conventions of the genre. If it possesses only one characteristic of literary fiction it surely remains genre fiction, probably either very good or very bad genre fiction. Nor do I think the categories are mutually exclusive.
I use the genre fiction label for one purpose only. When I see the label and I'm interested I take a much closer look before deciding to read it, and decide not to more often.
An interesting topic, but perhaps one for its own thread rather than this one.