“Development” is one of the key issues of our time. Although the ideas and images of development are inevitably represented in many ways, whether within academia, the policy world, or the general public domain, there is clearly a hierarchy of authority which determines what constitutes “valid” development knowledge, with certain forms of representations considered more “proper” than others. Typical examples of the “right” kind of representation include academic monographs, policy reports, or statistical overviews. The aim of this website is to promote the idea that fictional works of literature are as powerful - and in some instances, a better - means of communicating and understanding development.
The origins of this project lie in an academic paper co-written by David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers, and Michael Woolcock, respectively Reader in Social Policy at the London School of Economics, and Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Social Science the Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester. Originally conceived over the course of a series of conversations both amongst ourselves and with our respective students during 2002-2004, we then wrote the paper in 2005. When we began to submit it for publication in development studies journals, we initially found it difficult to get the paper accepted. In line with the main hypothesis of our paper, it was rejected on the grounds that it “was not development studies”. The Journal of Development Studies, however, took a more positive view, and published the paper as "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge" in its February 2008 issue (volume 44, number 2, pp 198-216. For those with access to JDS, the article can be accessed here, while a working paper version can be downloaded free of charge here. For a less formal summary of the main arguments that we lay out in the paper, please go to the summary.
Somewhat to our surprise, our endeavour seems to have captured people's attention! This first became apparent in the form of emails sent to us by a range of enthusiastic readers of our article, then with the article itself appearing on development studies course reading lists around the world, and, more recently, being extensively mentioned in the media, both formal and informal. Spurred by this interest, we have set up this website, www.fictionofdevelopment.org, in order to provide a focus for what is rapidly becoming a collective enterprise. Our original article included a reading list of 65 works, available here, of literary fiction that we felt - for different and sometimes idiosyncratic reasons - had important things to say about development. We did not claim to be either exhaustive or representative in our choices of literary works, which were dictated by our own personal readings, and hoped that our partial coverage would stimulate others to propose their own short-lists of readings. Many of the articles and blogs that have discussed since our piece and its reading list have mentioned new works of fiction, and we now invite anybody who feels so inclined to take our article as a starting point, and propose other works of fiction that could be included in a more comprehensive reading list of the “fiction of development”.
To do so, please go to the forum here where you can both suggest and comment on other books that you feel should be included and browse through other entries. Thank you for your interest and support for this project!