The whole idea that literature can only be about normal folks living normal lives amongst crushing normalness is very, very new. Literature used to almost always be about the fantastic. I think Gene Wolfe (a Catholic sci-fi/fantasy author who uses Catholic imagery in his writing) has an essay about this, and why the folks who teach that real “literature” can only be mundane are just a recent and sickening abberation.
Freegards
This is reflected to a great extent in the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. No genre writers (and certainly no science fiction), no children's writers, just Literature with a capital L.
It was the Realists (folks like Henry James) and Victorians who led this charge. As sort of proto-Fabian socialist types, they believed that literature should express the ordinary problems (usually having to do with finance or romance or a combination... a cynical reaction to the Horatio Alger literary movements of folks like Dickens) of ordinary people (who tended to be upper middle-class, just like the authors). In other words, folks like James asserted that the only true literature was the kind that, through some coincidence, they happened to write. How amazing!