Song Haoqing: Cao Xueqin's Authorship of the Last Forty Chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions

From the early 1920s, when Hu Shi’s Researches on "A Dream of Red Mansions" (Hongloumeng kaozheng) and Yu Pingbo’s An Analysis of "A Dream of Red Mansions" (Hongloumeng bian) were published, the view that the last forty chapters of the novel represent "the clumsy efforts of Gao E to write a sequel," has almost been considered conclusive. Recently, however, an article by Song Haoqing of the Chinese Department at Beijing Normal College has put forth the argument that the greater part of these last forty chapters were in