There is an odd cognitive dissonance that happens in these conversations, where we are simultaneously supposed to believe that literary fiction is “mainstream fiction” and genre fiction is “ghettoized,” and also that literary fiction is a niche nobody reads while genre authors laugh all the way to the bank. Throw into the mix a recent Wall Street Journal article on the increasingly practice of giving million dollar advances to literary debut novels, and you can see that the truth of the matter is pretty unclear.
From » When Popular Fiction Isn’t Popular: Genre, Literary, and the Myths of Popularity
Literary fiction is a genre
Oddly enough, while the essay includes that (or a variant) as a quotation, the author doesn’t address it–and I see no reason to regard it as anything other than the simple truth, especially Literary Fiction (capital-L, capital-F).
Nothing wrong with being a genre, but let’s be honest: many classic pieces of literary fiction are mysteries or romances or science fiction, now called literary because they’re classic.
Either no fiction is genre fiction or all fiction is genre fiction.