ABSTRACT
Philosophers have been interested in novels but seldom in the novel. Fiction and narrative have earned considerable attention, the former in philosophy of language from Frege and Russell to Kripke and Lewis, and the latter in recent philosophy of the self. 1 But which kinds of fiction, which sorts of narrative? These questions have traditionally not played a substantial role, whether the issue is semantics or virtue. And the result is that, while philosophers have regularly referred to particular novelists, and at times even offered extended commentaries on them—lively disputes have come to swarm around James, Proust, and Coetzee in particular—they have often betrayed what Northrop Frye once called a “novel-centered view of prose fiction” (1957: 304), ignoring not only, say, fables, tales, folklore, medieval mystery plays, staged dramas, closet dramas, Renaissance romances, horror stories, fantasy, young-adult fiction, and other forms, but also the broader question of why these other forms should seem to speak to so many fewer philosophical topics than does the novel, and should provide so many fewer examples. 2
