Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter One Text and Context

1.1 The Literary Context

1.2 Classifying the Late Qing: Literary Periods and Divisions

1.2.1 Defining the Late Qing

1.2.2 Old, New and Modern

1.3 Raising Fiction

1.4 The 'Courtesan Novel' and its Reading History

1.4.1 Editions and Texts: The Modern 'Courtesan Novel'

1.5 Literary Ancestry: A Brief Survey

1.5.1 Love and Warnings: Lessons from Ming Short Stories

1.5.2 Narrating the Perfect Woman: Caizi jiaren novellas

1.5.3 Textual Origins and Gendered Desire: Honglou meng

1.6 The Textual Context

1.6.1 Textual Meaning

1.6.2 Scholars and Texts in a Post-kaozheng Era

1.6.3 Technological Advances

1.7 Adverts and Bans

1.8 Rights to the Text: Authors and Authority

Chapter Two The Narrator Framed

2.1 Introducing Narrator and Text

2.2 Figuring the Narrator

2.3 Narrator, Text and Transmission: Mirrors and Frames

2.3.1 Frames

2.4 The Central Story and the Fiction of Unmediated Transmission

2.5 Narratorial Contradictions and Resolutions

2.6 The Effects of Edition

2.7 Conclusions

Chapter Three Characterisation in Context

3.1 Reading Red-light Characters: Textured and Gendered Relationships

3.2 The Essential Male: Qinglou meng

3.2.1 Text

3.2.2 Qing

3.2.3 Honglou meng

3.2.4 Female Roles

3.3 The Group Male: Fengyue meng

3.3.1 Narrated Character

3.3.2 Group Characterisation

3.3.3 Bilateral Relations: Purchase and Betrayal

3.3.4 Suicidal Loyalty

3.4 Conversational Drama: Haishang hua liezhuan

3.4.1 Stock Characters

3.4.2 Jealousy

3.4.3 Gendered Viewpoints

3.4.4 The Social Ladder

3.5 Reading Character

3.6 Conclusions

Chapter Four Structure: The Textual Representation of Itself

4.1 Narrative Structures and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

4.1.1 Narrative Drama: The Red-light Novel as Textual Soap-Opera

4.1.2 Poetry

4.1.3 Drinking Games

4.1.4 Macro-Structure: End Frames, Disjunctures, and the Supernatural

4.1.5 Romantic/Realist Distinctions

4.2 The Text in the World

4.2.1 New Printing Technologies and Novel Serialisation

4.2.2 Serial and Narrative

4.2.3 Text and Image

4.3 Subsequent Editions: Red-light Fiction Re-made

4.3.1 Modern Editions and the Place of the Author

4.3.2 Removing the Prefaces: A Case Study

4.3.3 Modern Editorial Approaches

4.3.4 Serial Editions

4.4 Conclusions

Bibliography

Index