Rereading the stone : desire and the making of fiction in Dream of the red chamber /

The 18th-century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng)--also known as Story of the Stone (Shitou ji)--is generally regarded as the masterpiece of traditional Chinese fiction. It describes the decline of a powerful family in late imperial China and offers a vivid portrait of cultural life and social institutions at that time. Yu (translator and editor of the 16th-century Journey to the West, 1977-83) departs from this customary view of Dream of the Red Chamber and instead examines the novel as a story about "fictive representation"--i.e., as a novel focusing on the story itself, especially on how it is told, rather than on its "faithful reflection and representation of historical and social reality." Yu argues convincingly that narration in the novel is mainly concerned with desire as a defining trait and problem with human beings--a concern that shapes the literary structure of the story. This is a pathbreaking work precisely because it offers a new and bold conceptual approach by which readers can better understand why Dream of the Red Chamber is a literary masterpiece. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. M. Hargett SUNY at Albany