So what is the difference between literary and genre fiction?



A thread.

As both literary fiction and genre fiction are products of mass culture, it makes little sense to describe the categories by examining the attributes of the members of the categories. There are too many and thus too many exceptions.

So we should look at when, where, and how the concepts emerged. Once upon a time there was no such distinction made. "There were witches in Shakespeare!" cry people who write books about witches, though their stuff will never be mistaken for Shakespeare.