Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

6

   

Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

Days could be spent doing so, and there is an increasing backlash 

against the term from both ‘literary’ writers – who don’t appreciate 

being packaged in an area sometimes portrayed as obscurantist, elitist 

and uncommercial – and ‘genre’ writers who object to the implication 

that their work is somehow ‘unliterary’ due to its subject matter. In the 

words of the Society of Authors’ former Chair William Horwood:

‘What is perceived as ‘literary’ writing is now a much broader 

spectrum. Literary fiction used to be defined in terms of a narrow 

subject matter thus excluding, say, crime fiction or thrillers as 

‘literary’. That’s changed.’ 

Horwood’s proposition is not only that there is no obvious definition of 

literary fiction, but that our understanding is always shifting. He pointed 

out that for many years the distinction between literary and popular 

fiction had a strong class dimension. 

If we look at how the market, the stakeholders and the media define 

literary fiction, we also draw a blank. In Nielsen BookScan data, for 

example, there is no recorded sales category for literary fiction; instead 

there is ‘General Fiction’. 

We therefore leave the definition of what literary fiction is, open. 

Operating with a flexible understanding of the term has two advantages: 

firstly, it’s the only practical way to research the question and, 

secondly, it reflects the fact that there are different and non-exclusive 

understandings that are at work amongst all participants. Literary fiction 

is not an absolute category. As with other art, it is what people believe 

it to be; hence we leave its boundaries undefined. What it definitely is 

not, for our purposes, is poetry or plays. We are looking at fiction. 

There were four main strands to our research methodology.