I began planning this project in the late 1980s, during the heyday of critical theory when interdisciplinary studies of literature had become common and literary critics were writing from theoretical vantage points developed through work in other fields, especially history and philosophy. Given my interest in the ethics of fiction, I noticed that the seemingly natural combination of moral philosophy and literature was virtually non-existent in literary criticism, despite all the attention to other branches of philosophy. Why? In an essay published in The Future of Literary Theory (1989), Martha Nussbaum concedes that to answer this question fully would be a long story, which “would include the influence of Kant's aesthetics; of early twentieth-century formalism; of the New Criticism. It would include several prevailing trends in ethical theory as well – above all that of Kantianism and of Utilitarianism, ethical views that in their different ways were so inhospitable to any possible relation with imaginative literature that dialogue was cut off from the side of ethics as well.”