Advertisement - Continue reading below

Definition of "subliterary" [subliterary]

  • Of, relating to, having the qualities of, or producing subliterature. (adjective)
  • Not written as or intended to be literature: subliterary works such as letters and diaries. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "subliterary" in a sentence
  • "If this style be "subliterary," then that category itself certainly needs to be rethought -- especially within the general context of science fiction."
  • "When we first see her in Minneapolis, a slattern in a junk-strewn apartment, she's living on scraps of loveless sex, drinking too much and picking up snatches of kids' conversations here and there, then dropping them into her chronicles of Kendall Strickland, the teenage heroine of a series called Waverly Prep that is, in fact, headed for the dustbin of subliterary history."
  • "Huston was ever an adapter of literary and subliterary properties, ranging from the grandiose—"The Bible" (1966), no less—to the ludicrous (the 1973 Paul Newman spy thriller "The Mackintosh Man")."
Words like "subliterary"