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Notes -
Moby-Dick is 100% literary fiction. Melville wrote it after years of mainlining New England literature and Biblical culture. At the time of writing he was contributing to literary magazines and complaining to Nathaniel Hawthorne:
I think this…intentionality…is what separates literary fiction from the rest. Melville is openly writing to convey something he feels deeply and passionately. This is not a substitute for craft, but a complement, as he pays great attention to the spiraling structure and the atmosphere. More importantly, though, it’s part of a conversation with the literary community of the time. He is making use of a common cultural context to compress even more into an already dense book.
The end result is a book that benefits from study in a way that mass-market fiction generally does not. There are countless classics which are better as romances, as adventures, as entertainment. Literary fiction has to ask of the reader something a little different.
There is plenty of so-called genre fiction that is written to convey things that the authors feel deeply and passionately, so it seems to me that maybe the author's passion is not enough to distinguish literary fiction? By the standard of passion, for example, a lot of sci-fi should be considered literary fiction, yet many aficionados of literary fiction would probably object to that.
The literary fiction vs genre fiction distinction isn’t that useful. I mean, I know it when I see it, but I don’t get all uptight about keeping genre fiction segregated from “pure” literary works. Works of surpassing quality can certainly include elements of “genre” fiction too, e.g. fantasy or sci-fi settings.
If there is a distinction that I would choose to maintain, it would be the distinction between works of art vs mere products.
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