This essay shows how genre and place enable 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's Wuthering 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 millennial Red Riding series 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.

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流派和地方的本体论工作：呼啸山庄与神秘景观案例

这篇文章展示了如何类型和地方使叙事小说的“本体阅读”成为可能。这种有意义的辩证法使读者能够推断出塑造虚构世界的存在条件。世界体系的思想家已经将物质世界的关键前提理论化了，这些物质世界是通过持续的联合和不平衡发展过程而形成的。本体阅读是一种比较实践，用于研究“弄清楚”这些过程的叙事工作——例如，通过约克郡黑色的“神秘景观”。艾米莉勃朗特的呼啸山庄() 可以比作一种犯罪小说，预示着从认识论确定性到本体论复杂性的“顽固”拉动。而大卫和平的千禧年红骑一系列小说和电影以复写方式层叠了多个过去和现在，呼啸山庄' 蒙太奇般的风景喷绘了结合的和不平衡的历史的接缝。这两种叙述都唤起了沼泽地的地形，这些地形有利于羊毛制造的悠久历史，这种制造依赖于大西洋奴隶制的活跃资本和贸易流动。这两部作品都呈现出具有广泛叙述能力的神秘景观：它们对人类与动物、生与死、过去与现在、自然与超自然之间的本体差异的困扰，为区域生成的一般灵活故事奠定了基础。因此，本体论阅读拓宽了文学研究。