Popular Fiction vs. Literary Fiction

I was raised in the kind of family where the worst insult you could be given was to be accused or reading a Nora Roberts novel. Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad - books that had stood the test of time - these were the only things acceptable as reading material. Though I never thought much about it, I guess it shouldn't have come as a surprise when I majored in English and learned to appreciate great literature for myself as I read Jane Austen and Faye Weldon and Salmon Rushdie and Proust. Reading Tom Clancy or John Grisholm was just something I never thought of doing.

But times change. I still tend to read mostly literary fiction, but I've ventured into popular fiction. Sometimes it's just as well written as any of the literary fiction I've read (Harry Potter, for instance). Oftentimes the plots are incredible and keep me turning page after page (The Murder Artist, by John Case), and sometimes the plot has a whole lotta potential and is hurt greatly by the quality of writing (Divergent, by Veronica Roth). I do love a good plot, but great characters and writing that flows are, in my opinion, necessary for any book to be great.

I do like reading about this "war" between genre fiction and literary fiction - between books that sell and books that get critical acclaim. The New Yorker article in the link below claims this divide no longer really exists. Do you think that's true? Judging by the first link below, written by a popular fiction author, I would say she doesn't agree. There seem to be hard feelings on both sides - the popular fiction authors feel they don't get respect, and the literary fiction writers seem to be mad at the public for not appreciating their work.
I think many books nowadays do a good job of combining the page turning quality of popular fiction with the greater themes of literary fiction.

For more on this topic:

Viewpoint of a popular fiction writer
http://www.elizabethlowell.com/popfiction.html

An overly simplistic definition
http://writerlyderv.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/literary-fiction-vs-popular-fiction/

http://ctwesting.com/2013/01/27/pop-fiction-vs-literary-fiction-diving-deeper/

From the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/its-genre-fiction-not-that-theres-anything-wrong-with-it.html

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/12/genre-versus-literary-fiction-edward-docx

http://www.publishingcrawl.com/2012/08/27/why-i-hate-the-term-literary-fiction/