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Medientyp:
E-Artikel
Titel:
The Ontological Work of Genre and Place:Wuthering Heightsand the Case of the Occulted Landscape
Beteiligte:
Goodlad, Lauren M. E.
Erschienen:
Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2021
Erschienen in:
Victorian Literature and Culture, 49 (2021) 1, Seite 107-138
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.1017/s1060150319000639
ISSN:
1060-1503;
1470-1553
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Beschreibung:
This essay shows howgenreandplaceenable the “ontological reading” of narrative fiction. Such sense-making dialectics enable readers to infer the terms of existence that shape fictional worlds. World-systems thinkers have theorized the critical premise of material worlds shaped though ongoing processes of combined and uneven development. Ontological reading is a comparative practice for studying the narrative work of “figuring out” those processes—for example, through the “occulted landscapes” of Yorkshire noir. Emily Brontë'sWuthering Heights() can be likened to a species of crime fiction in prefiguring the “hardboiled” pull from epistemological certainty to ontological complication. Whereas David Peace's millennialRed Ridingseries of novels and films palimpsestically layers multiple pasts and presents,Wuthering Heights’ photomontage-like landscape airbrushes the seams of combined and uneven histories. Both narratives evoke moorland terrains conducive to a long history of woolens manufacturing reliant on the energized capital and trade flows of Atlantic slavery. Both works body forth occulted landscapes with the capacity to narrate widely: their troubling of ontological difference—between human and animal, life and death, past and present, nature and supernature—lays the ground for generically flexile stories of regional becoming. Ontological reading thus widens literary study.