Literary fantasy may be the hardest of all the fantasy subgenres for me, at any rate, to describe. Stories in this category don't always share setting elements, character archetypes, or plot elements, and one person's idea of what counts as literary can be wildly divergent from another's. The history of the subgenre reaches back to early epics like Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, Beowulf, and The Odyssey, and incorporates plays, early novels, poems, and more between then and now. Chunks of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Thomas Mallory, and Edgar Alan Poe, for instance, all count. So in the spirit of the genre itself (a tendency to start interesting discussions being one of the things that defines literary fantasy), take everything I have to say here as a starting point for discussion. It covers so much, over so broad a period, and means so many different things to so many different people, that nothing I could say here would be completely uncontroversial.
That said, I'll start with something most people should be able to agree on: literary fantasy is fantasy that exists to make you think. These stories explore philosophies, ideologies, and existential questions through the vehicle of fantastical worlds and situations. The best of them entertain while they do it, but that's not their primary goal. Theme isn't just ticking quietly along in the background, it's front and center, in your face on every page, demanding your attention. As long as literary fantasy gets you thinking (even if you disagree with whatever it has to say about the world), then it's succeeded. Octavia Butler's investigations of femininity, masculinity, mortality, family, and colonialism in Wild Seed. Ursula K. Leguin's subtle undoing of expectations about who can be heroes and wizards in A Wizard of Earthsea. The character-driven short stories of Charles De Lint, Roger Zelazny, and many others, which take situations common in fantasy and show how they change if you layer realistic psychology over them, inviting you to ponder what it is you really love about fantasy, and why, and what that says about you. If you want a free glimpse at the cutting edge of the genre, you can check out the websites of modern magazines like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed as well.
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The themes explored in literary fantasy cover just about everything under the sun, but there are a few common ones. The most common is for a story to be about fantasy itself, and its meaning in the broader world. Literary fantasy tends to be the most self-aware of all the forms of fantasy, sometimes to the point of being incomprehensible if you haven't read the other texts the author had in mind when writing it. These are stories that know what they are, and that exist in conscious conversation with others like them. They are often reactions to prevailing norms in the genre, when an author wants to stand up and say, "Hey, wait a second! Let's stop and think about the roles we give women in fantastical quests, or why we're always writing about restoring monarchies. Is it a problem that we're so focused on heroes changing the world through the intervention of gods and magical artifacts? What gives a god-blessed hero the right to impose their ideas on everyone else? What if they're working for the wrong god? What if the people they rescue were happy before they showed up and tore the firmament asunder to right an ancient wrong?" or whatever else has gotten under their skin as they read. They're stories that take the point of view of the orc, the Southron, the Dark Wizard, the wicked witch, the evil queen. The best of them provide answers to those questions that shape new norms, which the next generation of authors then responds to, and so on and so on. Other common themes are explorations of big questions: what makes a good life, what makes people happy or unhappy, what's the proper role of religion or government in a person's life, etc.
