Many scholarly works have focused on The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber), yet not enough has been said to date about the novel's interactions with the literary conventions to which it responds. In her important addition to Hongxue (Redology), I-Hsien Wu guides us to and through various literary sources, illuminating The Stone’s creation process and possibilities of interpretation. Unlike scholars who analyze the novel through the lens of its autobiographical implications or understand it as an individual work to be attributed to the talent of its historical authors—Cao Xueqin (1715–63) and Gao E (1738–1815), Wu considers the story an open structure that assimilates and transforms preexisting motifs in order to form its own identity. Seen in this light, The Stone is nothing but a “redistributed signifying system” (p. xiii) that transposes ideas, words, and character types from previous literary sources.

Eroticism and Other Literary Conventions in Chinese Literature contains seven chapters. In a coherent fashion, Wu explores how intertextuality contributes to creating and understanding the protagonist Jia Baoyu's subjectivity. Chapter 1, “Erotic Literature,” focuses on texts that the novel interacts with when establishing Baoyu's sexuality. Wu begins by pointing out how historical romances that feature promiscuous men and women kindle Baoyu's passion for sex and romantic love. She then shows how the episode of Qin Keqing's bedroom links the novel to various erotic references. Finally, the focus of the chapter shifts to the creation of the Goddess of Disenchantment, a divine character who serves as Baoyu's sexual initiator. By tracing back to the legends of Nüwa, Sunü (the Immaculate Woman), and erotic goddesses in Song Yu's works, Wu demonstrates how The Stone bases the image of Disenchantment on the above-mentioned divine women who are fraught with erotic connotations. As Wu argues, Disenchantment differs from preexisting erotic goddesses in that she is an omniscient deity who transmits divine knowledge to the male protagonist and does not engage in sexual practice with the latter. Her sexual power is transferred to her sister Qin Keqing, who teaches Baoyu sexual techniques.

Chapter 2, “Mundane Lust,” discusses stories about Qin Keqing, Qin Zhong, and Wang Xifeng, whose narrative trajectories vividly illustrate the pleasure and the danger of lust in the human realm. Wu shows how Qin Keqing and Qin Zhong ignite Baoyu's heterosexual and homosexual desire, on the one hand, and Wang Xifeng displays the danger of lust, on the other. According to Wu, these three characters’ stories are inspired by Ming erotic fiction: Qin Keqing's image reflects the influence of Ming historical romances; Qin Zhong's story responds to fantasies about male-male love as well as monks’ and nuns’ sexual transgressions; Wang Xifeng's interaction with Jia Rui resembles stories in Zhaoyang qushi and The Plum in the Golden Vase, which warn against the fatal consequence of excessive desire. Through weaving together the above narrative threads, The Stone establishes a debauched world of its own.

In chapter 3, “Drama as Reading,” and chapter 4, “Drama as Performance,” Wu discusses the narrative function of two important literati plays embedded in the novel and illuminates the divergent roles of these two plays. As Wu argues, the Yuan drama The Story of the Western Wing provides Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu with a common language to communicate their feelings after they read the text together. In comparison, the play The Peony Pavilion creates a gap between the two characters because the listening experience of this drama only belongs to Daiyu and does not involve Baoyu. Wu thus concludes that Daiyu has a “unique, singular, and exclusive experience” with The Peony Pavilion (p. 73).

Chapter 5, “Making of Literati,” shifts readers’ attention to preexisting stories about scholars in Tang tales, Ming drama, and scholar-and-beauty (caizi jiaren) fiction. Here, Wu mainly focuses on two types of intellectuals in Chinese narratives: mingshi (eccentric literatus) and caizi (talented young man). She argues that the novel's first eighty chapters imitate the mingshi tradition and emphasize Baoyu's eccentricity. In this part, Baoyu shows his fondness for writing poetry and his contempt for studying Confucian classics. Unlike the first eighty chapters, the last forty chapters cast Baoyu as a typical caizi in accordance with the scholar-and-beauty tradition. Not only does Baoyu study Confucian texts, he also successfully passes the civil service examination. According to Wu, an inconsistency in Baoyu's characterization exists due in part to the change of authorship in the middle part of the story. This inconsistency creates two versions of Baoyu, each embodying a literatus ideal in Chinese history.

Chapter 6, “Making of Things,” moves from subjects to varied material objects, including fans, red leaves, and stones, in Chinese literature. Wu shows how these objects serve as important narrative devices and record human consciousness as writing mediums. After comparing the novel's fictional stone with real stone steles built in Chinese history, Wu interestingly asserts that The Stone has created the longest piece of “stone inscription.” “[I]n contrast with the historical, ideological, and moral grandness of the earlier stone monuments, the story of the stone presents a different type of grandeur: the grandeur of human emotions, which is ultimately translated into the grandeur of fiction” (p. 144).

In chapter 7, “Text in Flux,” Wu takes pains to compare various versions of the novel. The Stone has undergone many modifications in the hands of writers, commentators, and editors, who, as creative forces, helped shape and reshape the novel. Here, Wu pays particular attention to the jade stone's variations in different manuscript and printed editions. As she shows, some texts depict the stone as an object, whereas other versions portray it as the double of Baoyu. Although the stone was an anthropomorphic narrator in the early stage of circulation, editors later removed the stone's presence and reduced it to “an omniscient voice” (p. 159). The modifications made during the editing process indicate that the novel has achieved a life of its own since it reached readers’ hands.

Wu's book makes a great effort to establish the novel's relationships with various literary genres, which include ancient stone inscriptions, medieval poetry, Tang tales, and late imperial novellas. When discussing how each genre influenced the writing of The Stone, Wu focuses on individual themes and examines how the novel treats the same motif similarly or differently compared with other genres. In so doing, she unfolds many pictures in which the novel inherits well-established literary conventions, while at the same time staking a claim against conventionality.

Although the book focuses on The Stone, Wu offers insights into the creation of the Chinese novel in general. Prior to Cao Xueqin's novel, many vernacular works evolved from the oral tradition of storytelling and shared a larger story cycle from which they drew materials. The relationship between the Ming novels Water Margin and San Sui pingyao zhuan (Quelling the Demons’ Revolt) serves as a case in point. After carefully examining these two works, Patrick Hanan reached the following conclusion: “There seems to have been a storehouse of narrative convention on which the vernacular fiction drew, and a few stories appear to have been constructed largely out of stock elements.”Footnote ¹ Not only did Hanan point out the genetic connection between the two novels, he also revealed the mechanism for creating stories in premodern China. The Stone exceeded many Ming novels in achieving an unprecedentedly high level of narrative complexity and subtlety; however, its creation process did not differ drastically from those of earlier works in that they all drew materials and inspiration from literary conventions in order to generate new stories. Based on Hanan's and Wu's opinions, readers should treat Chinese vernacular novels as aggregations of signs that move from one text to another to serve different narrative purposes.

In the book, Wu mainly deals with literary works and seldom discusses nonliterary texts. As we know, The Stone contains numerous Daoist elements and a strong Buddhist undertone. One may wonder what the novel's connections with religious sources might be. How do Buddhist and Daoist ideas find their ways into the narrative? How does the novel's intertextual relationship with a religious text differ from that with a literary work? These questions are worth considering if Wu hopes to take the discussion of intertextuality further. Without doubt, Eroticism and Other Literary Conventions in Chinese Literature enriches our understanding of The Story of the Stone. Scholars and students of Chinese literature will gain new perspectives on the masterpiece after they enter the complex literary matrix in Wu's book.