Bringing together theories of the novel and existentialism, this study demonstrates that the realist novel fundamentally changed the methods and aims of philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by developing unique and compelling forms for the representation of reality. Using archival and biographical sources, this study examines in a more systematic way than previous scholars have done why thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus not only read the realist novel, but also incorporated novelistic forms and techniques into their philosophical writing. For these philosophers, the realist novel was the equivalent and not merely the illustration of a philosophical view of life. The existentialists were drawn to the realist novel not because it gives a detailed description of empirical experience or because it accurately portrays social conditions, but because the realist novel gives a view of life that emerges from the particular and contingent circumstances of individuals.

Novels such as George Eliot's Middlemarch, Émile Zola's L'Oeuvre, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance do not only represent empirical and sociological aspects of the world; they also embody, in their very form, the issue of how we ought to understand the contingency, unfinishedness, and spontaneity of lived experience. Although earlier literary critics interested in the relationship between existentialism and literature have focused primarily on existentialist themes or characters in the novel, this study is distinctive because it examines the relevance of existentialist form to the realist novel. Close textual analysis of realist novels from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century reveals that the novel developed various forms for the representation of existential aspects of ordinary experience: a floating axis of representation to depict the contingency of everyday life, an aesthetic of the unfinished to reflect the dynamism and incompleteness of life projects, and a narrative framework for portraying how agency can be exercised independently of fixed metaphysical and moral laws.