The label of “literary fiction” is a purposeful and cheap rebranding of the term literature. Publishers know that what they’re publishing today has nothing to do with literature proper, so they’ve created a new label for such books to sever our connection with the masters of the past. Contemporary novels are “literary,” but they’re not literature.

As a result, contemporary writing is completely alienated from the longstanding tradition of humanistic inquiry—which was the goal all along.