文档介绍：鲁东大学学士学位论文-1- Introduction A Dream of Red Mansions isone of the "Four G reat" 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 like s pany. Born with a jade in his mouth ,he is spoilt by his grandmother , mother and a lotof girls , yet he lives in fear of his father and prefers writing poetry to studying the classics . The heroine, Bao-yu's cousin , Dai-yu is sickly, easy to depression, over-sensitive, always conscious of her status as an orphan, also, she isa talent poet ,smart, sagacity and prone to sarcasm. Ina word ,a classic Romantic heroine. She and Bao-yu are in love with one another and this, and their continual misunderstandings and Dai-yu's eventual unhappy end, form one of the novel's cent re. 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 pleted 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 artof language in classical novels, A Dream of Red Mansions deserves to be called a model . In20 th century, when the study of the novel ison 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 characterizati