有关红楼梦的外文献.doc

ON NOT BECOMING A HEROINE: LIND AI-YUA ND CUIY ING-YING ANN WALTNER Published by: The University of Chicago Press Why and how people read fiction is an issue that has increasingly come under the scrutiny of Western literary critics. In her recent Becoming a Heroine, Rachel M. Brownstein suggests ways in which fiction may serve a special role in shaping an adolescent girls expectations of the future .The fiction Brownstein discusses is chiefly nineteenth-century English novels; the readers she discusses are twentieth-century American adolescents. The novels of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, where the plot centers on finding a husband and the marriage is the happy ending, are read,so Brownstein suggests, as scripts for life by countless adolescent girls who view finding a husband as their central task in a life that will in many crucial ways end with marriage. Expectations about life and marriage are gathered not from observations of the real world but from ruminations within the realm of fiction. Fictional heroines, too, may be readers of romance, and the ways in which the heroine reads the romance reveal a good deal about her, about the romance, and about the fictional world they both inhabit. Lin Dai-yu, a central character in Cao Xue-qins eighteenth-century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, is a reader of romances, especially dramas such as Romance of the Western Chamber.Western Chamber is one of the finest exemplars of the scholar-beauty romance, a genre in which a beauty and a talented youth meet, fall in love, overcome obstacles, and eventually marry. The genre mandates a happy ending.Dai-yus reading of Western Chamber leads her to see her own future with the image of Cui Ying-ying, the heroine of Western Chamber, firmly in mind.It is an image that both attracts and repels her. While Rachel Brownsteins reader of Jane Austens novels finds an unambiguous map for the future, Dai-yu sees a warning in the story of Ying-ying.The resonances between Western