Literary vs Genre Fiction

There is plenty of debate about the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction as well as misunderstanding of what the literary fiction is and why it is often hailed as higher than the rest.

The major difference is that genre fiction appeals to emotions while literary one to the intellect.

Genre fiction should be likable and often the most important in it is to have an appealing characters and to lesser extend settings and story. For example Edward Cullen from Twilight (I hope the spelling is correct since I all my knowledge if this books is from all this fuss over the Internet) is very popular with women and that, particularly for this book, alone is what sells the book and even makes it a best seller.

Literary fiction on the other hand appeals to intellect and characters, setting and story is primary used as vehicle to describe and illustrate a topic or topics chosen by the author; because of that there is a plenty of literary criticism that discusses issues and topics covered by the author. Complexity of literary fiction comes from the fact that while use of metaphors and allegories allows to illustrate the issue better they also make it more obscure and demand a degree of mental effort from readers to figure the point out.

I think that in all times there were plenty of people who preferred simple mass fiction and there was plenty of simple mass fiction for these people. It's just simple mass fiction doesn't lives too long and rarely stays in history like literary fiction is. Because unlike literary fiction, where every book is insightful in a unique way, audience of mass fiction constantly wants to consume essentially the same stories in a new wrap and there are plenty of new writers who are constantly churning new and new ones.

But despite obstacles literary authors of the past managed to succeed and literary books were read in the past and I am sure that even nowadays there are people who interested in intellectual literature and therefore would seek literary fiction even in this sea of simile.