红楼梦英语本科论文.docVIP

Introduction A Dream of Red Mansions is one of the Four Great Chinese novels. Written in the mid-18th century, it is set in the aristocratic Jia household in Beijing. In China， Red Mansions represents a prosperous family, so the title really reflects the theme of the story, the illusions of wealth and grandeur which quickly vanish, leaving behind memories which seem more like a dream rather than realistic lifestyle. The hero is Bao-yu, a teenage boy who likes female company. Born with a jade in his mouth, he is spoilt by his grandmother, mother and a lot of girls, yet he lives in fear of his father and prefers writing poetry to studying the classics. The heroine, Bao-yus cousin, Dai-yu is sickly, easy to depression, over-sensitive, always conscious of her status as an orphan, also, she is a talent poet ,smart, sagacity and prone to sarcasm. In a word，a classic Romantic heroine. She and Bao-yu are in love with one another and this, and their continual misunderstandings and Dai-yus eventual unhappy end, form one of the novels centre. The greatest achievement of the novel is its vivid characerisation. Of the more than four hundred persons in the novel, at least forty are highly individualised. Under Cao Xueqin’s pen, those persons not only have their personal looks, but their voices and emotions. The subtle mentality of the characters leaves deep impression in the reader’s mind. Cao Xueqin completed a masterpiece with the painstaking labor of all his lifetime and left after him a lasting reverberation in the mind of his posterity. To the art of language in classical novels, A Dream of Red Mansions deserves to be called a model . In 20th century, when the study of the novel is on the trend, the art of its language draws much attention naturally, and makes great achievements. According to the statistics, besides the countless bibliography which studies its language, there are at least four hundred papers to study its language. The language of the characteriza