Kuwisdelu (or anyone else for that matter), could you offer up some examples of literary fiction that would clearly fall under si/fi, or fantasy.
Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Galapagos (many, many of Vonnegut's are sci-fi/fantasy--all his novel are literary fiction)
Towing Jehovah, James Morrow
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (Nebula Award and Booker Prize)
Great examples above. A few more that quickly come to mind are:
Orwell's
1984 is science fiction.
Thomas Pynchon's novels are generally some kind of historical sci-fi.
Baudolino by Umberto Eco is historical and fantasy.
...etc.
And they're all literary fiction.
What is it about literary fiction that makes it literary fiction if it has all the genres within it?
That's kind of like saying "what is it about YA that makes it YA if it has all the genres within it"? It can't just be that the protagonist is young, because there are plenty of adult books with young protagonists. It's something else less definable, in the voice and the pacing.
What is it about literary fiction that makes it literary fiction? Well, it can't just be good writing, because plenty of genre fiction also has stellar writing. It can't just be character-driven, because plenty of genre fiction is also character driven. It's something else that's hard to define, and plenty of people disagree over it. I like literary agent
Nathan Bransford's description, which I think sums it up nicely:
In commercial fiction the plot tends to happen above the surface and in literary fiction the plot tends to happen beneath the surface.
(You can read the blog post for elaboration. It's really good.)
I'd also add that my way of thinking about it is to view "plot" and "story" as different things. The way I think about it is more along the lines of, in literary fiction, "the
story happens under the surface of the plot." In straight-up genre fiction, the plot
is the story. To me, that's why some works of literary fiction can be described as plotless, at least when plot is put in terms of "events that happen." For me at least, when I write, and why I would call it "literary fiction," is that when I think of the stories I want to tell, I don't think in terms of plot. For me, plot is just a vehicle for the story, but it's not the story itself. But I think a lot of the best (and certainly the most commercially successful) literary fiction tends to have a good plot in addition to a good story.
When you call something "literary fiction," it's about the nature of the story and the writing, not about the content. Notice that genres generally tell you something about the content of a story and what you can expect to happen. A category like literary fiction doesn't do that.