*Includes color illustrations.

This book is part of the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Victor Mair (University of Pennsylvania).

What does it mean to live in a work of art? Reading Art in Literature: The Marvelous Case of “The Story of the Stone” is a literary study of the art objects lavishly deployed by Cao Xueqin (1710–1765?) in his beloved novel (better known as The Dream of the Red Chamber). These objects are intended as expedients to preserving the vanishing culture of his lifetime, while offering their symbolic and allegorical significance as guides to a path of enlightenment. This single work of fiction embodies a realistic vision of elite and aspiring Chinese society during the Late Imperial era, while at the same time relentlessly deconstructing that vision by means of an allegorical superstructure that insists upon that world’s ephemerality. Reading Art in Literature foregrounds these issues; however, this is a literary rather than an art-historical study. This study not only illuminates the meaning behind the variety, provenance, placement, and uses of these objects but also how the art objects in the novel function as a guide to the author’s fictional world. These include masterpieces of Chinese painting, treasures from the dowries of the women who married into the Jia family, mystical objects with the power to awaken minds set upon destructive paths, and Prospect Garden, a feat of garden engineering and design meant to honor the emperor’s favor but used to protect the children of the Jia Family from the vicissitudes of adult life beyond its walls.

The art objects in The Story of the Stone shed light on many aspects of the lives in the novel. The novel’s comprehensive picture of the life of an aristocratic Chinese family at the zenith of the Qing dynasty is widely acknowledged. Since Cao Xueqin’s work is inclusive—of social classes, of levels of wealth, of educated and uneducated, of dedicated servants of the Emperor and masters of devious personal and material exploitation—he presents every possible facet of a culturally vibrant but politically perilous Imperial capital. In this world, objects can be and are endowed with as much sentimental and symbolic significance as any human relationships, and in many cases the characters, unable to find or seize on chances to articulate their feelings, fall back on objects to express them.

The method of literary readings of art objects in fiction encompasses the role visual culture plays in the novel. In addition to the many functions of the author’s selection, identification and positioning of art object, the illusory nature of “physical” objects created by Cao Xueqin in his fiction bolsters the ultimate purpose of the text: to illustrate the core Buddhist belief that all experience is illusory. No matter how accurate, authentic, appropriate, or aesthetically transcendent the descriptions of objects in fiction may be, the reader’s attachment to them, and their moment in time, is an illusion.