I’m using for my subject Contemporary Literature in English passages from Robert Eaglestone’s Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013). This is a slim volume, as it corresponds to the series, with accessible language (unlike most literary criticism), and quite bold in its approach to a daunting topic: how to define and understand current fiction. In my subject I’ve made a point of teaching students that non-fiction is a likewise important part of current literature, but I haven’t found (yet) a book that deals with both categories from a comprehensive point of view. Eaglestone’s, then, will have to do.
All books on literary criticism will become obsolete the moment quality AI-generated texts start being published, but for the time being the differences in the literary criticism between 2013 and 2026 are not so noticeable that I can be accused of subjecting my students to old-fashioned ideas. In fact, I believe that Eaglestone has tried harder than many other literary critics to alter the field for good. Not that I agree with all he proposes (actually, I agree very little), but his book is great to raise issues in class.
In Chapter 3, “Genre”, Eaglestone tries to make sense of the more and more untenable difference between literary fiction and genre fiction, labels used to define novels as if plays were not fiction. He begins by blaming the Leavises for the split, accusing F.R. Leavis of creating an artificial distinction to justify what could be taught in the university classroom or discussed in academic work, and Q.D. Leavis of demonizing readers who prefer so-called genre fiction. Although mostly forgotten now (which means never quoted), the Leavises had a great influence on the institution of Literature but they were just part of the international forces that, fighting for the respectability of the novel in academic circles, found a solution to its vulnerability in isolating novels of a certain topic from the rest, calling them ‘literary’. The problem is that while it was once possible to find literary novelists that put much artistic care in the prose they wrote, from Austen to Woolf, passing through Dickens and Joyce, that way of approaching the novel died after Modernism, when interest in form trumped interest in artistic prose (blame Postmodernism). Now every literary novelist, aspiring or acknowledged as such, writes rather functional prose, with very few flourishes if any, and limited perhaps to the use of slang, jargon or dialect.
Faced with this problem, Eaglestone and many others have struggled to maintain the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction alive while trying to correct the certainly prejudiced view of the Leavises (who, by the way, were a married couple with three children) and their academic descendants. This is practically impossible because the whole foundation is wrong. Novels are novels and what they deal with has nothing to do with the quality of the writing.
Eaglestone offers the following ideas in his Chapter 3: “There is then, ‘open’, unrestricted fiction and ‘closed’, restricted fiction. ‘Open’ fiction is what used to be called literary fiction, able to cover anything, in any form. ‘Closed’ fiction is what used to be called ‘genre fiction’, shaped by its own self-chosen restrictions. This is absolutely not to say that ‘restricted’ fiction, genre fiction, is badly written, badly plotted, or less valuable, or that it can’t deal with serious social or personal issues. Indeed, genre fiction, because of its popularity, has a wider social reach than ‘unrestricted’ fiction. It is to say only that it has restrictions and it is the restrictions themselves that make readers read and enjoy it. Conversely, this division of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ fiction is not to praise all traditional literary fiction, examples of which can, of course, be dull, uninspiring, and cliché-ridden.”
Nobody speaks of open and close fiction, but Eaglestone shows here confidence that the labels would catch on. In the previous pages Eaglestone had been arguing that literary fiction is ‘open’ because, unlike genre fiction, it does not restrict itself to a set of topics and conventions. He supports this claim with a variety of examples certifying the diversity of literary fiction, a category so wide-ranging and encompassing that it can occasionally admit genre fiction in it (George Orwell’s 1984 or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go are science fiction), provided it is written with a serious intention. This adjective, ‘serious’, is the bane of all discussion of genre, as it is usually invoked to cut short any argument in defence of the fiction that the defenders of literary fiction insist on calling genre and to perpetuate the ongoing confusion: if it’s not serious, then it’s genre fiction; if it’s serious, then it’s literary fiction even when it’s genre fiction.
Eaglestone, you can see in the passage I have quoted, wants very much to get rid of prejudice, but ends up maintaining high prejudice in his distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ fiction. My students were quick to catch that although he insists that “this division of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ fiction is not to praise all traditional literary fiction, examples of which can, of course, be dull, uninspiring, and cliché-ridden” he is reinforcing the existing hierarchy. In our current vocabulary, anything ‘open’ is superior to anything ‘closed’ and, well, it seems to me that part of the definition of bad literary fiction (‘cliché-ridden’) is usually applied to genre fiction.
All this mess comes from not contradicting the Leavis to assert that there is only one genre, the novel, and that any subdivisions by topic and/or quality are always biased. Understandably, 1940s academics didn’t want to be accused of offering banal teaching, and they fiercely restricted the type of novels that could be taught in university classrooms to a limited set that the Leavises and others presented as ‘the tradition’ and ‘the canon.’ The canon wars of the post-Leavis period, beginning in the 1980s, corrected the exclusion of feminized and racialized persons to begin with, and later widened the fight against prejudice to include all kinds of writers. Except genre writers. This is the reason why my students are so reluctant to read science fiction or detective fiction, though, curiously, they have got rid of any prejudices against fantasy on their own, following extra-academic social networks trends.
I happen to believe that literary fiction is indeed a genre, perhaps by exclusion. Public libraries (at least the ones of the Diputació de Barcelona) place all the novels on the same shelves and use tiny labels (pictograms) attached to the spines to inform readers about their contents. For instance, in my local library, science-fiction novels carry the pictogram of a robot. Literary fiction novels carry no pictogram, but you might say that this absent pictogram is a sort of zero pictogram that defines the genre. I don’t want to fall into the rabbit hole of arguing that literary fiction is what is left once genre fiction is excluded from the public library shelves because this supposes that genre fiction cannot be literary, a point any intelligent reader should dispute. The problem is that we have no better label for it, unless we call it ‘exclusive fiction’, which I hate.
So, let’s see if I can define ‘literary fiction’ as a genre:
- it does not deal with the future and has a low interest in science and technology
- it is impressionistic and mostly focused on the present (or the past), with no noticeable amount of research for accuracy
- it focuses on a (usually traumatic) personal crisis against a social or political background that matters far less than the protagonist’s psyche
- it welcomes autobiographical elements and borrows biographical elements from persons the author knows or knows about
- it cares little for elaborate worldbuilding, offering limited description
- it tries to experiment with narrative technique, usually with form (choice of narrator, point of view, chronology of events)
- it can be entertaining, but this is not its main aim
- it does not shy away from unlikeable characters or themes
- it does shy away from melodrama and sentimentalism, which is why it often uses narrative experimentation that disrupts emotion (see e)
- it seeks a reader with a high threshold of tolerance for boredom
- it is not plot-driven nor designed to be a page-turner
- it is always suspicious of any flight of imagination, though it may contain fantasy elements if it partakes of magical realism
- its authors aspire to awards (above all, the Nobel Prize) and critical recognition rather than sizable sales (though literary fiction can sell well occasionally)
- its authors aspire to being remembered by posterity, and are frequently the object of academic research by persons who believe that literary fiction is not a genre, and who would not do research on genre fiction
Now, the tricky thing: the label. Perhaps I should ask the Nobel Prize committee what they call the literature they reward (which includes poetry and drama by the way). Or perhaps I should call literary fiction ‘Nobel-oriented novels’ and be done with it. ‘Snobbish fiction’ comes to mind, but to be fair the ones who are snobbish are the literary scholars that protect it so fiercely from contamination. ‘Serious fiction’… ha! ‘Non-genre’ fiction… ha! Perhaps ‘highbrow fiction’ is not so wide off the mark. Help!!!
As a reader I’m quite omnivorous and prefer long prose narrative to all the rest, by which I mean novels but also many categories of non-fiction: autobiography, memoirs, narrative journalism, travel writing. I tend to judge books according to the parameters chosen by the authors, not by a hierarchy imposed from above. I’ve read autobiographies that are far more satisfactory as narrative than many novels of any description, and, though I have my own personal preferences, I read all kinds of novels. I believe, in short, that it makes sense to consider novels by theme, provided ‘literary’ novels are also seen as thematically-bound fiction.
I once taught many years ago (2003-4) a course in which we read five novels:
UNIT 1: Literary experimental fiction. Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow, or the Nature of the Offence, 1992.
UNIT 2: Literary poetical fiction. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 1998.
UNIT 3: The thin line between the literary and the non-literary in realist fiction. Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, 1995.
UNIT 4: Non-literary genre fiction: realist. Ian Rankin, Black & Blue, 1998.
UNIT 5: Non-literary genre fiction: fantasy. Terry Pratchett, The Truth, 2001.
I would perhaps change the labels today, but I think this subject gave students a better understanding of the panorama the novel offers today than subjects in which only the first two categories are considered (sorry to sound so smug). What really surprised me is that students found it very difficult to read Pratchett, a very popular author who firmly rejected that he was writing literature (though he was). What was the difficulty? His quirky fantasy worldbuilding and, above all, that he uses a very witty kind of humour. Perhaps I should teach this course again, with newer novels…
So, I still can’t say with any accuracy what literary fiction consists of, but I’m trying! And, thanks, Robert Eaglestone.