Is it Nonfiction? Is it Creative Nonfiction?

As my students study creative nonfiction this week it has raised certain issues of classification. Some things are not very clearly either fictional or nonfictional. Which are they, and does this matter? Other works are clearly not fictional, but just because they are nonfiction, does this mean they are literary? I pose these examples as problem cases:

Creative Nonfiction - An Introduction

Here's a quick overview of the genre of literature known as creative nonfiction.

For the longest time, literature proper (at times termed belles lettres) has been restricted to poetry, drama, and fiction. But it's become clear over time that much writing that falls outside of these kinds of imaginative writing still possesses qualities valued from the more traditional literature. In short, something need not be fictional to have aesthetic appeal. There is a refreshing variety of such literature.

The personal essay is the most prominent genre of creative nonfiction. But even it is part of a larger category which we might call life writing. That category includes not only the personal essay, but also autobiography and biography, as well as memoir.

Phillip Lopate's anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay, is a good starting place for exploring personal essays. In autobiography, one can go back to St. Augustine's Confessions or to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and contemporary examples include Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes or Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. A classic biography is Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and a well written contemporary biography is David McCullough's John Adams.