....or are we too near to it to judge properly. "Greats" of the past were little more than popular culture of the past, so how will the future judge works of our current age?
Also, what do you think might be judged worthy of the title of literary in the future? Pic related.
>>8193740
>Is Literary and Modern Fantasy Possible?
yes but whenever something gets awarded with the literary label it sheds the genre ones
c.f: the fortress of solitude, delillo, 'magical realism' etc
>>8193740
If it's good enough to be considered literary, it's not genre fiction.
cf: Margaret Atwood making other scifi writers fanny flustered.
>>8194079
>Atwood
>literary
>>8193740
Fantasy is unfortunately usually considered one of the main genres of consumer based genre fiction, which is excluded from literary fiction, so not really. Not in a meaningful way at least. A fantasy writer could write a quintessentially postmodern book but completely fail to be recognized as "literary."
>>8194083
teehee
>>8194089
>A fantasy writer could write a quintessentially postmodern book but completely fail to be recognized as "literary."
can you give me an example of such a misunderstood fantasy book? for instance gene wolfe wrote like this and a few people recognize him as surpassing genre fiction
>What struck me on the beach—and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow—was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in anything, and in fact probably did rest in everything, in every thorn on every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.
I don't those sprawling medieval, swords-and-sorcery epics will ever really qualify as being literary because they're 99% about the world-building.
More subtle kinds of fantasy are already considered literary.
