Eroticism And Other Literary Conventions In Chinese Literature: Intertextuality In The Story Of The Stone (cambria Sinophone World Series)

Building on the novel's rich content and this vast scholarship, and using Julia Kristeva's terms on intertextuality, this book presents a new understanding of the famous Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone). This is a must-read for anyone interested in Hongloumeng and Chinese literature. This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Victor Mair (University of Pennsylvania). The Story of the Stone, also known as Dream of the Red Chamber, is unquestionably the most beloved and most celebrated work of prose fiction in Chinese literary history. For two and half centuries, the novel has inspired a ceaseless flow of critical interpretation ranging from the allegorical, autobiographical, and bibliographical to the poststructural, forming a particular field of study called hongxue (“red” studies). How does The Story of the Stone utilize language and text to make meanings of the human lives it creates? How does The Story of the Stone exist through its relation to previous fiction? To answer these questions, this book argues that the mythic stone's harsh critiques of historical romance (yeshi), erotic fiction (fengyue bimo), and scholar-and-beauty fiction (caizi jiaren) cannot be taken at face value. Instead, they signify The Stone's anxiety of influence and allude to the nature of intertextuality. In this light, this book argues that the novel's construction of lust shows its indebtedness to erotic literature; its making of romance is created through the use of drama as reading and as performance; in the protagonist's confrontation with and final submission to social expectations, the novel wrestles with the portrayal of young literati in the scholar-and-beauty convention; and finally, following a genealogy of objects featured in literature to animate human lives, the mythic stone is created to question the convention of storytelling, not only in pre-existing fiction but also in the novel's many previous lives in manuscript versions and printed editions. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in The Story of the Stone, and for readers interested in novel, fiction, drama, and other literary genres and subgenres in Chinese literature. Preface -- Erotic Literature -- Mundane Lust -- Drama As Reading -- Drama As Performance -- Making Of Literati -- Making Of Things -- Text In Flux. I-hsien Wu. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.