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.