"With one book, the genius of Cao Xueqin proves to have the universality of Shakespeare. Its combination of intellectual scope and immediate human drama has no counterpart in Western fiction. To appreciate its position in Chinese culture, we must imagine a work with the critical cachet of James Joyce's Ulysses and the popular appeal of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind—and twice as long as the two combined."
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Dore J. Levy, Ideal and Actual in the Story of the Stone (Columbia University Press, 1999), as quoted in Daniel S. Burt's The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time (Facts on File, 2010), p. 223
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber
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Dream of the Red Chamber
Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦 Honglou Meng), also called The Story of the Stone (石头记 Shitou Ji), composed by Cao Xueqin, is one of China's Four Great Classical Novels. It was written sometime in the middle of the 18th century during the Qing Dynasty. Long considered a masterpiece of Chinese literature, the novel is generally acknowledged to be the pinnacle of Chinese fiction.
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