Literary Fiction, Shakespeare and Me

Abstract

This article strives to arrive at an understanding of what“Literary Fiction” means at present and how it is different from Commercial or Genre Fiction. I write this article as a professor of English as well as a novelist. The article goes beyond mere theory and scholarship, into the realms of the creative process of a novel. It studies not only the nature of literary fiction but how that nature is largely being determined today by the publishing industry of the West. The paper shows how William Shakespeare has spoken through literary fiction from the eighteenth century to the present. As a novelist, I can see how it is difficult for literary fiction writers not to come under his sway. The influence is visible in the works of a very large number of novelists writing in the English language in England, America, and the Commonwealth countries.