Focusing on the receptions and transformations of Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) in late Qing and modern China, this dissertation examines the ways in which this eighteenth-century literary canon was constantly being re-conceived, rewritten and reinvented during this momentous era. Through the delineation of the transformative role that Dream of the Red Chamber played in modern cultural production, this dissertation explores the intertwined critical issues concerning literary modernity, emotion, gender and modern culture.

Chapter One introduces the conceptual and methodological meanings of the term “Dream Factory,” while Chapter Eight describes the great work’s afterlife in contemporary age. The main body consists of two parts with six chapters. Focusing on the turn of the 20...[ Read more ]

Focusing on the receptions and transformations of Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) in late Qing and modern China, this dissertation examines the ways in which this eighteenth-century literary canon was constantly being re-conceived, rewritten and reinvented during this momentous era. Through the delineation of the transformative role that Dream of the Red Chamber played in modern cultural production, this dissertation explores the intertwined critical issues concerning literary modernity, emotion, gender and modern culture.

Chapter One introduces the conceptual and methodological meanings of the term “Dream Factory,” while Chapter Eight describes the great work’s afterlife in contemporary age. The main body consists of two parts with six chapters. Focusing on the turn of the 20^th century, Part One elucidates the paradoxical nexus between private emotions and national narratives in Nanwuyeman’s New Story of Stone, the public sphere and the sentimental cultivation of Xu Zhenya’s Poetry on Dream, and the complicated reception of the symbolic figure Lin Daiyu. Part Two enters 1930s, surveys the comic sequels and adaptions of Dream in modern metropolis, how republican writers endeavored to imitate, emulate and recycle the “aesthetics of delicate materiality” in Dream, how this great novel working as a form of cultural capital and a public resource, has been consumed and reconfigured in modern commercial culture.

I argue that at a time of drastic cultural changes, Dream of the Red Chamber was not a static repertory, but rather it functioned as a dynamic discursive space that interacts with modern people’s feelings, thoughts, psychology, and the complexity of their historical situations. Through detailed analyses of the first-hand, original materials covering a range of literary and visual genres, this dissertation sheds new light on the roles of the canon and tradition in the formation of Chinese literary modernity.