Readers of genre fiction have very specific expectations when it comes to plot, characters, setting, and theme, and each genre has its own conventions and rules. Literary fiction differs from genre fiction fundamentally in the fact that the former is character-driven, the latter plot-driven. There is a strong tendency in genre fiction—though not a binding rule—to imply that life is fair and to let the hero or heroine, after great struggle, win out in the end; and a complementary tendency in literary fiction to posit that life is not fair, that triumph is partial and happiness tentative, that human existence is full of ambiguities, and that the hero and heroine are subject to mortality.

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edit…, loc. 485