Mourning the Ming or Mourning the Self? Writing Dream of the Red Chamber and Reading It Across Time
Since its emergence in the eighteenth century, Dream of the Red Chamber has been widely regarded as the greatest novel in the Chinese literary tradition. Written over more than a decade by Cao Xueqin under conditions of poverty and without patronage, the novel was left unfinished at the author’s death. Yet despite censorship, repeated bans, […]
