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Introduction
Until very recently, much of the literary scholarship on the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Honglou meng (The Story of the Stone or Dream of the Red Chamber) was centered on what was seen as the autobiographical nature of the work. Critics of the novel, especially those in China, tended to focus their attention on the life of the author, Cao Xueqin (d. 1763), believing the interpretation of the novel to be-to a large extent-hinged on a successfil reconstruction of Cao Xueqin's familial relationships, especially with those members of the Cao clan such as Red Inkstone (Zhiyanzhai) who were the original audience of his manuscript. Yet, any literary work-even a truly autobiographical one-arises from its tradition. Its meaning will be better understood and its aesthetic values better appreciated when we consider it in relation to other works in that tradition. For our interpretation of Honglou meng, what is more pertinent is therefore not the author's personal ties to his relatives but the ties of the novel to its "relatives," works that formed the literary context for its creation.
The question now becomes: what works can be considered to be Honglou meng's relatives? In his commentary on the novel, the nineteenth-century scholar Zhang Xinzhi (fl. 1828-50) argued that Honglou meng was a continuation of the tradition started by the sixteenth-century masterworks in vernacular fiction: "The Honglou meng grows out of [tuotai the Xiyou ji journey to the West], takes a trail [jiejing) blazed by the Jin Ping Mei [Plum in the Golden Vase], and takes its spirit [sheshen from the Shuihu zhuan [Water Margin or Outlaws of the Marsh" (Plaks 1990, 327). Zhang's observation, brief as it is, has proved to be a seminal influence on more recent scholarship. Su Manshu (1884-1918), for instance, commented that "[it is indeed pertinent to consider Honglou meng as an inverted image [daoying of jin Ping Mei" (MQ 2:715). Zhou Ruchang, a contemporary leading scholar of the novel, or redologist, has proposed in one of his recent essays that the thematic structure in Honglou meng, as deliberately designed by the writer, is a neat and orderly antithesis of that in Shuihu zhuan. Zhou argues that, while the theme in Shuihu zhuan may be summarized with the phrase Win haohan (heroes of...