Quote:
Originally Posted by DixieGal
There are canons that everyone has to read in college. Those are "Great Literature" mostly because somebody decided they were Great a long time ago. I always sort of base it on whether it has stood the test of time, or whether it has the power to change you.
Shakespeare's work has stood the test of time very well and is still relevant. The characters are archetypal and can be easily found in any community. The stories ring true still today. I don't personally find this to be quite so true in Victorian literature, although the millions of Jane Austen fans would probably eviscerate me for saying so.
Books like A Passage to India or The Great Gatsby or Ulysses still have the power to change an individual. After you read them, you are left with a new view of the world, like your eyes have opened a little bit wider.
To me, however, these criteria apply just as well to a book coming out next month as a book published 400 yrs ago. We never know when the next Great Literature will appear, but only that it will.
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"Great Literature" and literary fiction are not necessarily the same thing. Shakespeare's work, while certainly great literature, was genre material produced for general consumption. Both general and literary fiction can find its way into canon; what distinguishes literary fiction is not so much quality or endurance, but idiosyncrasy.
General fiction relies on convention: structured plot, near-journalistic (or alternately, florid) prose, easily recognized character relationships, and typically a third-person omniscient or roving third-person limited perspective. Literary fiction may discard an advancing plot (
The Sound and the Fury), specific characters (
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler) or even spelling and syntax (
Finnegan's Wake), operating by its own rules. It requires more effort of interpretation from the reader, but it can convey thought-structures beyond the means of conventional storytelling.