The cultural decline of literary fiction

What “literary fiction” is and why it’s contentious

• Several commenters only learned from the thread that “literary fiction” is a distinct marketing/critical category (character‑driven, stylistically ambitious, “serious”) rather than just “all fiction.”
• Some argue this label is gatekeeping: many 19th‑century bestsellers now called “literary” were effectively their era’s commercial or even “smutty” entertainment.
• Motivations to read it: exploring the edges of human experience; aesthetic pleasure in language and form; transmitting complex worldviews more fully than nonfiction; “exercising the mind.” Others say they get the same from sci‑fi or other genres.

Politics, “wokeness,” and predictability

• One camp rejects “publishers went woke” as an explanation, seeing culture‑war complaints as mostly terminally‑online noise.
• Another says contemporary fiction often foregrounds message over story, with shallow, moralizing treatments of race/gender making plots and character arcs predictable.
• A recurring nuance: this is framed less as “too progressive” and more as bad, didactic craft.

Accessibility, difficulty, and literacy

• Debate over whether modern readers lack the skills or patience for dense/complex work, versus authors being self‑indulgent and hostile to readers.
• Some point to literacy surveys suggesting a large share of adults struggle with level‑3/4 tasks (inference, metaphor), implying much litfic is inaccessible to most.
• Others counter that plenty of high‑quality, stylistically rich novels remain readable to any educated adult; “inaccessible = bad” is itself a misunderstanding of art.
• Underneath is a bigger anxiety: collapse of attention spans, post‑literacy, and a culture that favors images, immediacy, and literalness over metaphor and ambiguity.

Back catalog, competition, and other media

• Strong theme: new books now compete with all existing classics; those old novels never disappear and often outsell contemporary litfic.
• Similar dynamics noted in music, games, and film, but some argue network effects (concerts, charts, fandoms) still favor new music more than new books.
• Others stress that books also face competition from TV, games, social media, audiobooks and podcasts; reading itself has become just one of many entertainments.

Genre fiction vs literary fiction

• Many commenters say they’ve drifted to sci‑fi, fantasy, thrillers, or “progression fantasy”: same big ideas, but more fun, accessible, and less pretentious.
• Counter‑view: most genre fiction has weak characters and shallow themes; when sci‑fi works feel profound, it’s usually because they are doing “literary” work under another label.
• There’s broad agreement that the boundary is porous: some speculative works are clearly “literary,” and many historical “literary” works were once genre‑adjacent.

Economics, critics, and the broken pipeline

• Several accept the article’s economic story more than its cultural one:
  • Magazine markets that once paid well for short fiction have collapsed with ad revenue moving online.
  • Humanities academia remains, but stable jobs are scarce; young writers can’t subsidize novel‑writing as easily.
• On the demand side, some buy the “status spiral” thesis: authors and MFA programs optimizing for critical prestige and awards rather than readers, producing work tailored to a tiny critical subculture.
• Others think the bigger problem is corporate consolidation and risk‑averse publishing: preference for easily marketed, derivative books and franchise‑style series.

Cultural and educational shifts

• Multiple threads tie the decline to broader trends:
  • Anti‑intellectualism and the devaluation of humanities education.
  • Proliferation of amateur critics online, eroding the social status of professional criticism.
  • A sense that much “serious” contemporary art (literature, music, visual art) has retreated into insular experimentalism that ordinary people find unpleasant or opaque.
• At the same time, commenters note that classics and some contemporary authors still deeply move new readers, suggesting the audience for demanding fiction isn’t gone—just smaller, more fragmented, and harder to reach.