What Is Eighteenth-Century Xiaoshuo?

This article responds to the question, “What is eighteenth-century fiction?” with a focus on Chinese fiction. It begins with an overview of eighteenth-century Chinese fiction and a deeper reading of the explicit metafictionality of China’s most famous eighteenth-century novel, Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber). Then it critically interrogates the assumed equivalency between the English term fiction and the Chinese term xiaoshuo through a historical overview of the unequal literary and linguistic engagements between Europe and China. The article concludes that “we can neither reduce Stone to fiction nor deny it the status of fiction” and calls for a way of reading Chinese literary works in translation without essentializing either sameness or difference, one that acknowledges the dangers and distinctions involved yet insists on communicability across differences—one based first in the pleasure of reading for its own sake.