商品簡介
Cao Xueqin was a Chinese novelist born in Nanjing around 1715, and still famous for his huge novel Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber), which is considered the foremost of the four great classic novels of traditional Chinese literature. This book is a biography of the first 30 years of his life. It also gives an overview of the important family, literary, intellectual, and social-historical influences that affected his work. The author of this book lived and taught in China for 8 years and in Asia for 20. As very little is known of Cao Xueqin's life (he was not conclusively identified as the author of his famous novel until 1921), the situation here is similar to the situation for English-language readers interested in Shakespeare. The author works to construct his biography from interviews with major Chinese literary scholars, including Cai Yijang, Sun Yuming, Shen Zhijun, Zhou Ruchang (who contributes the forward to this book), and others. In the Chinese school of literary criticism, the novel is considered to be autobiographical; the author here takes the approach of trying to give readers a sense of what it would be like to live in Xuequin's time and place, as a member of a high-status family that had fallen from favor and who decides at the age of 30 to create a new role for himself as a writer. This is the second biography of Cao Xueqin in English, and the first by a Westerner. It is meant for general readers with a strong special interest in novels and their history, and for readers in traditional Chinese literature and culture. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
作者簡介
Ronald R. Gray has degrees in philosophy from Brown University and the University of Colorado at Denver. He has published papers on Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) in Chinese and Western publications; guest co-edited a special 2005 issue of the Tamkang Review devoted to the novel; and is co-editor of Between Noble and Humble: Cao Xueqin and the Dream of the Red Chamber (Peter Lang, 2009) written by the noted Honglou meng scholar Zhou Ruchang. He lived in East Asia for 20 years and taught at universities in China, Japan, and South Korea. Gray currently teaches in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio University.
