What counts as literary fiction is a little bit malleable, especially when it comes to historical fiction with a literary bent. You won't find Ken Follett on this list, but you will find Patrick O'Brien and Dorothy Dunnett. The latter two authors are using the genre of historical fiction to explore something deep about human time, time, and history itself. That's what, to my mind, makes them literary. This is, of course, an incomplete list, but it's meant as a starting place, and as something that I'll add to as time goes on. One note: I'm including as historical fiction any work that's written by a contemporary author about a time period that's at least thirty years distant. This is arbitrary, I know.