Charles Williams in The Figure of Beatrice writing on final cause in the art of fiction (or one of its modes, anyway). I think this may be Williams’ best book. I read it 15 years ago but I didn’t understand then how to apply it to my own art. And even still it’s a hard sell. Someone, drawing on Williams and Sayers among others, needs to write a Defense of Allegory for our time like the various “defenses” of poetry or of vernaculars in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (and even into the romantic period as with Shelley). It would be a defense of virtue ethics into the bargain.