I think we should disaggregate what is meant under the heading 'literary fiction'
Would it not be more useful to think in a somewhat more granular fashion about what we are thinking about when we are bewailing the declining popularity of literary fiction, and the fact that litfic writers are unable to support themselves by writing litfic:
Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically.
When one considers that within the broad marketing categories of various genres there are increasingly targeted subgenres (within crime there's e.g. cosy, Scandi-or-similar-noir, historical, police procedural and numerous others) so that people know what they're getting, and they will not be getting dysfunctional detective's harrowing backstory in the middle of their comfortable tea-shop mystery.
I really think litfic should have its own hanky code, I really do, so that one could stay away from 'sensitive male coming of age story' or 'male midlife crisis' or 'lust and rage/do dance attendance on my old age' or indeed, 'sensitive middle-class lady actually has time on her hands and opportunity to have a wistful affair (even if it's not in Hampstead)', or whatever narrative trope does not float one's boat, and they would not all be subsumed under the one umbrella.
I am also not entirely sure why literary fiction as a category (see above proviso, I am sure there are deserving authors who work within an area that cannot be subsumed to crime/sff/romance/chick lit/YA/etc) is something to be angsted over in this way.
(Unless it somehow resonates with other narratives around extinctions of various life forms occupying threatened ecological niches?)
And, with all the angsterama in that piece, there is nothing about the importance of public libraries, a service that is, mentioned on a different page in the print edition, being savaged to the bone. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2700552.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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