There is a difference though between saying that the intentions the author evinces in writing his or her text are the meaning of the text, and saying that the text reveals a good deal about the intentional values held by the society that the text represents. Language is public and we do not control it, despite what Humpty Dumpty says. The author does not control the meaning of what is written, but that certainly does not mean we cannot investigate those meanings.

Well, to take the obvious starting point, what about Jane Austen? -- any of her novels you choose, really, other perhaps than Northanger Abbey.¹ My own favourite is Emma, though perhaps her exploration of the virtues (Aristotelian and Christian) is equally near the surface in e.g. Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. The great tradition of subtle moral reflection in novel form continues in e.g. George Eliot, Henry James, and Edith Wharton.

Then of course there are the Russians (longer, yes: but wonderful -- and, for heaven's sake, with such masterpieces to read, don't waste time on a fourth rate writer like Ayn Rand). What about Crime and Punishment, for another obvious suggestion? And the greatest of all novels -- Anna Karenina -- is shot through and through with reflection on what it is to live well.

1. Incidentally, there's an engaging essay by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, 'Jane Austen and the Moralists' which is well worth reading (perhaps most accessible in old collection of Critical Essays on Jane Austen edited by B.C. Southam). He puts it beautifully "I am not going to try to make out that Jane Austen was a philosopher or even a philosopher manquée. But … she was interested from the south side in some quite general or theoretical problems about human nature and conduct in which philosophers proper were and are interested from the north side."

A question was asked last year, which had a different aim (but a very similar example). The responses, though, included ideas that should help you with your question:

http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/3587

Although I agree with most, if not all, of Professor Taliaferro's response to your fascinating question, I want to add a few remarks that may take the discussion in a slightly different direction.

You asked whether Shakespeare was a philosophical genius, and whether philosophers have "deduced a coherent Shakespearean belief system from his works." I think that the two questions should be distinguished. It's not at all clear to me that an author may be a philosophical genius only if a philosophical system can be deduced from his works. Indeed, Wittgenstein, for example, who to my mind at least was certainly a philosophical genius, resisted--at least in his 'later' writings--systematization altogether, so it would be somewhat misguided even to try to deduce a philosophical system from his writings. One might of course respond that Wittgenstein was systematically anti-systematic, and that that in itself constitutes a kind of systematicity. But that seems to me to be a Pickwickian sense of 'systematic'. I propose, therefore, that systematicity not be taken as a criterion of philosophical genius, or even of philosophy. I now turn to the question of whether Shakespeare was a philosophical genius.

One could similarly ask whether Dostoyevsky or Philip K. Dick, was a philosophical genius. Both writers, in certain of their works of fiction--to my knowledge, neither wrote works of philosophy--raise philosophical questions of various sorts, just as Shakespeare certainly does. But does treating an issue of philosophical interest make the treatment of that issue philosophical? I don't believe that it does; I believe that what's distinctive of philosophy is that it makes arguments, and it's not clear to me that works of fiction--or at least the works of fiction by the Dick or Dostoyevsky, or at least their works that I know--themselves make arguments. (Characters in works of fiction make arguments, to be sure, but I would be very wary of identifying the author of a work of fiction with any one of his or her characters; moreover, it's not clear to me that that the point of a work of fiction is to make an argument--although that is not, of course, to say that I know what the point(s) of a work of fiction are, and in fact I would think that that is a matter of interpretation that would need to be settled on a case-by-case basis.) Similarly, despite the recent vogue of treating films as 'doing philosophy', I'm quite suspicious of such an approach to film, although whether some film could be seen as 'doing philosophy'--even if it is granted that what's distinctive of philosophy is advancing arguments--is a question that can only be determined by considering the film in question. (Of course, it might be argued that what I have highlighted as the distinctive feature of philosophy is too restrictive, and perhaps a more catholic conception of philosophy would more readily admit of treating works of literature and films and other art forms, too, for that matter, as philosophical. But could dance, say, be treated as philosophy? Now there's an interesting question, that might reveal something about the nature of the kinds of art that we think could be philosophy...)

What, however, about authors such as Diderot, or Tolstoy, or Camus, or Borges, who wrote both works of fiction and philosophy? Might their works of fiction be philosophy? This, I think, is a subtler and somewhat different matter, but I'm inclined to think that even the fictional works of such authors, although they may be seen as illustrating or exploring certain ideas with which they engaged philosophically, are not themselves instances of philosophy. (War and Peace might be a tricky case for such a view. But I stand by it, at least for the nonce.) But there are of course other authors who wrote both works of fiction and works of philosophy, and here too, I think that in order to adjudicate the issue, one would need to consider each case.