Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T16:06:24.060Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Ontological Work of Genre and Place: Wuthering Heights and the Case of the Occulted Landscape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Lauren M. E. Goodlad Open the ORCID record for Lauren M. E. Goodlad [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 49 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: The Wide Nineteenth Century , Spring 2021 , pp. 107 - 138
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story by an Addict.” Harper's Magazine, May 1948, 406–12.Google Scholar
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: T. Egerton, 1813.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Holquist, Michael and Emerson, Caryl, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Baldick, Chris. Introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, edited by Baldick, Chris, xi–xxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Barker, Juliet R. V. The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of Three Sisters. New York: Pegasus Books, 2010.Google Scholar
Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhaskar, Roy, and Callinicos, Alex. “Marxism and Critical Realism: A Debate.” Journal of Critical Realism 1, no. 2 (2003): 89–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackburn, Robin. “The Corbyn Project: Public Capital and Labour's New Deal.” NLR 111, no. 6 (2018): 5–32.Google Scholar
Brennan, Timothy. Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. “Editor's Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights.” In Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Newman, 341–44.Google Scholar
Brontë, Emily. “Faith and Despondency.” In A Celebration of Women Writers, edited by Ockerbloom, Mary Mark. University of Pennsylvania Digital Library. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bronte/poems/pbe-faith.html.Google Scholar
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Edited by Newman, Beth. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007.Google Scholar
Carrithers, Michael, Candea, Matei, Sykes, Karen, Holbraad, Martin, and Venkatesan, Soumhya. “Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester.” Critique of Anthropology 30, no. 2 (2010): 152–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charles, Alec. “‘Pictures at an Atrocity Exhibition’: Modernism and Dystopian Realism in David Peace's Red Riding Quartet.” In Analyzing David Peace, edited by Shaw, Katy, 61–76. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011.Google Scholar
Chitham, Edward. Life of Emily Brontë. Stroud, UK: Amberley, 2010.Google Scholar
Christensen, Matthew J. “African Popular Crime Genres and the Genres of Neoliberalism.” Social Text 31, no. 2 [115] (2013): 103–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868.Google Scholar
Condé, Maryse. La migration des coeurs. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995.Google Scholar
Condé, Maryse. Windward Heights. Translated by Philcox, Richard. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.Google Scholar
Cosgrove, Denis E. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Coundouriotis, Eleni, and Goodlad, Lauren M. E.. “What Is and Isn't Changing? An Introduction.” MLQ 81, no. 4 (2020): 399–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1852–53.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eliot, George. Romola. London: Smith, Elder, 1862–63.Google Scholar
Flintoff, Everard. “The Geography of Wuthering Heights.” Brontë Studies 31, no. 1 (2006): 37–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frow, John. “‘Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need’: Genre Theory Today.” PMLA 122, no. 5 (2007): 1626–34.Google Scholar
Galloway, Alexander R. “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism.” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 347–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 1857. Edited by Jay, Elisabeth. London: Penguin Books, 1997.Google Scholar
Goodlad, Lauren M. E. The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodlad, Lauren M. E., and Sartori, Andrew. “The Ends of History: Introduction.” Victorian Studies 55, no. 4 (2013): 591–614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gorak, I. E. “Border Countries: Wuthering Heights and Shirley as Regional Novels.” Criticism 32, no. 4 (1990): 449–68.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Hart, Matthew. “The Third English Civil War: David Peace's ‘Occult History’ of Thatcherism.” Contemporary Literature 49, no. 4 (2008): 573–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hart, Matthew, and Peace, David. “An Interview with David Peace.” Edited by Rebecca Walkowitz. Contemporary Literature 47, no. 4 (2006): 546–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heywood, Christopher. “A Yorkshire Background for Wuthering Heights.” Modern Language Review 88, no. 4 (1993): 817–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heywood, Christopher. “Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights.” Review of English Studies 38, no. 150 (1987): 184–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, Pat. The Genesis of Industrial Capital: A Study of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry, c. 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2010.Google Scholar
Inikori, Joseph E. “Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in England.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 4 (1987): 771–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Internet Surname Database. www.surnamedb.com (accessed 13 October 2020).Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.Google Scholar
Jarrold, Julian, dir. Red Riding. 1974. New York: IFC Films / MPI Media Group, 2009.Google Scholar
Kettle, Arnold. An Introduction to the English Novel. New York: Harper, 1960.Google Scholar
King, Martin, and Cummins, Ian. “Our Side of the Mirror: The (Re)-Construction of 1970s’ Masculinity in David Peace's Red Riding.” Sociology and Criminology 1, no. 1 (2013): 1–7.Google Scholar
Krebs, Paula M. “Folklore, Fear, and the Feminine: Ghosts and Old Wives’ Tales in Wuthering Heights.” Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 1 (1998): 41–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal.” Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 1 (2005): 87–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. “Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar.” In Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, edited by Copjec, Joan, translated by Mehlman, Jeffrey, 81–95. New York: Norton, 1990.Google Scholar
Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Leavis, Q. D. “A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights.” In Lectures in America, by Leavis, F. R. and Leavis, Q. D., 83–152. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969.Google Scholar
Lockwood, Dean. “‘When the Two Sevens Clash’: David Peace's Nineteenth Seventy-Seven as ‘Occult History.’” In Twenty-First-Century Fiction: What Happens Now, edited by Adiseshiah, Siân Helen and Hildyard, Rupert, 49–65. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longmore, Jane. “Rural Retreats: Liverpool Slave Traders and Their Country Houses.” In Slavery and the British Country House, edited by Dresser, Madge and Hann, Andrew, 43–53. Swindon: English Heritage, 2013.Google Scholar
Lukács, Georg. Conversations with Lukács. Edited by Theo Pinkus. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Lutz, Deborah. The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. New York: Norton, 2016.Google Scholar
Marcus, Sharon, Love, Heather, and Best, Stephen. “Building a Better Description.” Representations 135, no. 1 (2016): 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsden, Hilda. “The Scenic Background of Wuthering Heights.” Brontë Society Transactions 13, no. 2 (1957): 111–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsh, James, dir. Red Riding 1980. New York: IFC Films / MPI Media Group, 2009.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. “The Future Results of British Rule in India.” New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, 9 August 1853, https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm.Google Scholar
Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Newman, Neville F. “Workers, Gentlemen and Landowners: Identifying Social Class in The Professor and Wuthering Heights.” Brontë Studies 38, no. 4 (2013): 313–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peace, David. 1974. New York: Vintage, 1999.Google Scholar
Peace, David. 1977. New York: Vintage, 2000.Google Scholar
Peace, David. 1980. New York: Vintage, 2001.Google Scholar
Peace, David. 1983. New York: Vintage, 2002.Google Scholar
Peace, David. GB84. Faber and Faber, 2004.Google Scholar
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Yorkshire: The West Riding. Edited by Radcliffe, Enid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Phillips, Caryl. The Lost Child: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.Google Scholar
Poklad, Josh. “Time-Space Compression in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.” Brontë Studies 42, no. 2 (2017): 100–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Randall, Adrian. Before the Luddites: Custom, Community, and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Randall, Adrian. “The Philosophy of Luddism: The Case of the West of England Woolen Workers, ca. 1790–1809.” Technology and Culture 27, no. 1 (1986): 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rena-Dozier, Emily. “Gothic Criticisms: Wuthering Heights and Nineteenth-Century Literary History.” ELH 77, no. 3 (2010): 757–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffer, Talia. Romance's Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shachar, Hila. Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: “Wuthering Heights” and Company. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silver, Sean. “Production and Practice.” In A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Powell, Margaret K. and Roach, Joseph, 4:53–74. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.Google Scholar
Skenazy, Paul. “Behind the Territory Ahead.” In Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, edited by Fine, David, 103–25. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. 3rd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Spooner, Catherine. “Crime and the Gothic.” In A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Rzepka, Charles J. and Horsley, Lee, 245–57. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, Susan. “The Ballad in Wuthering Heights.” Representations 86, no. 1 (2004): 175–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Tucker, Anand, dir. Red Riding 1983. Collingwood, Victoria: IFC Films / MPI Media Group, 2009.Google Scholar
Turnbull, Sue. The TV Crime Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel, Form and Function. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.Google Scholar
Von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa. “Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade.” ELH 62 (1995): 171–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wade, Francesca. “Caryl Phillips: ‘If they don't look at my picture, they think I'm a woman.’” The Telegraph, 16 March 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/11470135/Caryl-Phillips-If-they-dont-look-at-my-picture-they-think-Im-a-woman.html.Google Scholar
Warwick Research Collective (WReC). Combined and Uneven Development. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Williams, Emlyn. Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and Its Detection. London: Pan Books, 1967.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Wilson, Richard George. Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Wood, Steven, and Brears, Peter. The Real Wuthering Heights: The Story of the Withins Farms. Stroud, UK: Amberley, 2016.Google Scholar
Wynne, Deborah. “Charlotte Brontë and the Politics of Cloth: The ‘Vile Rumbling Mills’ of Yorkshire.” Brontë Studies 43, no. 1 (2018): 89–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar