I keep hearing about literary fiction, and how it is so much better than genre fiction. What exactly is literary fiction?
Answer
There's always the good old wikipedia definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction
My take on it is that it is often used to mean "serious" fiction (whatever that is), as opposed to fiction that is merely "entertainment". It often seems to be thrown about in the context of snobbery (that is, someone may not "read that airport bookshop rubbish" because they like literary fiction), but I don't know if people really say those sorts of things, or if it's just the impression that the other side ("genre" people) think they might say.
It's just one of those terms that means different things to different people (as @neilfein's answer suggests).
(For a quantitative answer, how about: the average number of metaphors per paragraph?)
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