Posted by Steven
on 20/6/2009, 11:18:42, in reply to "The Woman Warrior and Housekeeping"
76.187.110.226
Another interesting item in Amy Hungerford's "Lecure 14" was her definition of Literary Fiction as distinct from Genre Fiction. I am paraphrasing and generalizing her bullet points here because she made them in reference to one particular type of plot.
- Literary Fiction uses the conventions of plot to say something about language or narrative as such, or to deliver artistic satisfactions that are not automatically entailed by the plot itself.
- Genre Fiction does not reflect on the arts of language or deliver aesthetic satisfactions beyond those entailed in the plot itself.
She goes on to say that "Both literary fiction and genre fiction matter to what scholars think of as 'literary history.'"
I'm not sure how to reconcile her definition of literary fiction to Realist or Naturalist works where the author's purpose is to deliver a social message with minimal artifice. Can we infer social consciousness to be a form of aesthetic satisfaction to meet her definition in cases such as The Grapes of Wrath?
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