I'll never write "literary fiction," contemporary or otherwise. I hate purple prose and I don't enjoy elaborate subtext and trying to figure out what the author meant by this or that, like studying literature back in high school. I pretty much just write stuff that people like me would enjoy reading.
Writers of note have (most?) often been "surprised to learn of" the symbolism in their works when informed by critics, teachers, and younger generations. Some have said so straight out. Writers since 1960 or so (i.e., our post-modernist era) are generally more overt rather than symbolic in what they're saying — the subtext is the text itself. Symbolism was more prevalent in the Hemingway-Fitzgerald-Wolfe era (the modernists) and the one before it that
they were rebelling against, but even then often imposed by interpreters.
As for language, I challenge anyone to show me purple prose in any literary novel of the last 60 years, which is most of my lifetime.
Literary fiction is not literature. For florid writing, you'd mostly have to go back to the 1800s or very early 1900s.
Realism is the ideal nowadays, and has been since the 1960s or 70s. That's why writers exploring supernatural ideas must call their work Magical Realism instead of just Magical to get a hearing. (Except JKR and her imitators.)
Go to Kindle and download free samples of Elizabeth Strout's
Olive Kitteridge (one of the very most representative examples), Haruki Murakami's
Norwegian Wood, Ian McEwan's
Amsterdam, and Katie Kitamura's
Audition. They are what literary fiction looks like today — to the extent that any one book or handful of books can stand for such a large category — and they're nothing like the impression your high school teachers gave you.
The primary identifying characteristic of literary fiction in our era is that it's written freestyle. It pays no attention whatsoever to the myriad (largely ridiculous, often harmful) rules of "good writing" imposed on genre publication. The language that reads as unnatural today is not in literary writing, it's exactly in genre writing, which has been distorted by all kinds of groundless paint-by-numbers maxims like "use dynamic verbs," avoid was-were-is-are (whereby an appropriate "were standing around" becomes an inappropriate and misleading "stood") and similar folderol — language that is simultaneously dumbed down and amped up like a Thomas Kincade mall gallery painting. The literary market is the only fiction market today where you can write in plain, ordinary English the way even popular writers used to do.
