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The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave: A Generic Study of the Story of the Stone. By XIAO CHI. Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies, no. 93. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies Publications, University of Michigan, 2001. xii, 286 pp. $50.00 (cloth).
In The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave, Xiao Chi synthesizes a broad sweep of Chinese and Western scholarship on the Story of the Stone (Shi tou jt). Xiao draws on the work of Kao Yu-kung regarding the importance of a lyric aesthetic to the Chinese literary tradition to argue that the Story of the Stone "developed lyricism to an unprecedented extent" (p. 20) not only in its formal application of lyrical parallelism and its suggestive rather than progressive exposition of events but also in its portrayal of a lyric aesthetic in the daily life of the Daguan yuan (Grandview Garden). Yet, Xiao states, the very trajectory of the novel's plot spells the end of a lyric ideal; the deterioration of the Daguan yuan is emblematic of the triumph of the prosaic and the material over the lyrical within not only the novel itself but also late imperial literary culture. Xiao sees the caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty) novels...