1 The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge DAVID LEWIS, DENNIS RODGERS and MICHAEL WOOLCOCK 1 This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy- oriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative authority, and representational form, and explore these by comparing and contrasting selected works of recent literary fiction that touch on development issues with academic and policy-related representations of the development process, thereby demonstrating the value of taking literary perspectives on development seriously. We find that not only are certain works of fiction ‘better’ than academic or policy research in representing central issues relating to development, but they also frequently reach a wider audience and are therefore more influential. Moreover, the line between fact and fiction is a very fine one, and there can be significant advantages to fictional writing over non-fiction. The article also provides a list of relevant works of fiction that we hope academics and practitioners will find both useful and enjoyable. But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. – Byron (1973 [1819-24]: 182) My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, above all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything. – Conrad (1985 [1897]: 1) I. INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPMENT AND REPRESENTATION As Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton (1995: 27) have remarked, ‘development’ is one of ‘the central organizing concepts of our time’. As such, ideas and images of development are inevitably represented in a wide variety of ways, whether within academia, the policy world, or the general public domain. To this extent, it can be contended that all forms of development knowledge can be – and historically have been – largely understood as a series of ‘stories’. This is true not only in the pragmatic sense that to have an impact on public opinion, organisational strategy, or within academia, even the most elaborate equations and sophisticated data analyses need to be able to be expressed in everyday language (Denning, 2000), but also in the deeper philosophical sense that all knowledge claims are necessarily embedded in particular subjective understandings of how the world works, as was famously pointed out by Walter Benjamin (1989) in his classic essay ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’. Benjamin not only contended that all knowledge of reality is unavoidably subjective but also that it is inevitably mediated by the representative forms which describe it, and that different modes of representation therefore impart different visions of the world. He was of course not the first to highlight this issue, which can be placed within a philosophical