Literary ontology is originally a philosophical term, which is a theory to explore the basic characteristics of existence as all reality. Later applied to aesthetics and literature and art, literary ontology refers to the theory and doctrine about the origin and essence of literary existence. Because literary researchers understand literature from different angles, their views on literature itself are also varied. For example, Freud's psychoanalysis school attributed all human psychological activities to unconsciousness, and thought that harmony and art were just the transfer, modification and sublimation of unconscious desires. Therefore, the unconscious, that is, the instinctive impulse centered on sexual desire, is the source of literary creation. Russian formalists believe that the object of literary research is not literature as a whole, but literariness, that is, what makes a work a literary work, so literariness is the essence of literature. Ingarden, one of the representatives of phenomenological aesthetics, believes that literary works are neither conceptual entities nor material entities, but a unique field of existence and a purely intentional object; It consists of four levels: language phenomenon layer, semantic unit layer, reproduction object layer and schema layer, which are mutually conditional and progressive. In China, the study of literary ontology, especially in the phenomenological sense, has just begun.

At present, there are roughly three views on literary ontology in literary theory circles: (1) Starting from the fact that literature is a reflection of social life, it is considered that the ontology of literature is social life, which can be called the ontology of reflection theory; (2) Starting from the fact that literature is the expression of a writer's thoughts and feelings, it is considered that the ontology of literature is the writer's spiritual world, which can be called expressionism ontology; (3) From the point of view that literature is literature itself, the ontology of literature is the aesthetic feature of literature and works themselves, which can be regarded as the ontology of textology or phenomenology. In addition, some researchers combine the ontology of reflection theory with the ontology of expression theory, thus forming a view between the two. The in-depth study of literary ontology may constitute the basic form of the development of China's basic literary theory.