This paper uses conceptual blending theory to study the emotional poetic metaphors related to flowers in A Dream of Red Mansions. Exploration of how these emotional poetic metaphors are related to flowers in constructing meaning achieves the creative intention of the author. The proposal of this paper also reveals the "cognitive iceberg", which is hidden in the emotional poetic metaphors related to flowers in A Dream of Red Mansions so as to provide the readers with a wider range of reading horizons. Because human emotions are highly abstract, people tend to use metaphors to vividly express these abstract emotions. In A Dream of Red Mansions, the poet uses a lot of emotional poetic metaphors related to flowers to express the characters’ various inner emotions, including sadness (including loneliness, worrying, longing, hopelessness, helplessness, despair, etc.), happiness, and pride. These emotional poetic metaphors are mainly constructed by using the images of appearances, characteristics, periods, colors, fragrances, and growth environments of flowers. Through this analysis we can understand the metaphorical process, which projects from the flowers to human beings, is actually a process of conceptual blending. Through the mechanism of conceptual blending, the poet projects the flower onto human beings, using the flower to metaphorize human beings, making the abstract things more concrete while making the strange things more familiar, so as to facilitate comprehension and offer a deep impression. In addition, every poetic metaphor should be rooted in a certain cognitive model and culture model. In the process of conceptual blending of poetic metaphor, cognitive models and culture models play very important roles. The cognitive model provides certain possibilities for the formation of poetic metaphor, and the culture model is the key factor which allows these possibilities to become a reality.

AphraBehn wrote the first novel in the English language. She may justly be called, ‘Mother of the English Novel’. Behn’s Oroonoko [2], predates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by thirteen years. Although her highly original work of fiction has sometimes been dismissed as a ‘romance’, similar to the proto-fiction that appeared in the previous century, her work in fact marks a wholly new departure in English literature. It bears the hallmarks – the narration of events as recalled and filtered through the eyes of its characters; the interest in exact narrative detail; the claim that the tale is a true story, and based on eye-witness accounts – that thereafter would define the novel proper. Oroonoko is now generally agreed to draw on the author’s first-hand experience, albeit highly fictionalised, of a period spent in the Dutch colony of Surinam, in South America. Behn’s novel is remarkable in the period when it was written, for the respect with which its narrator describes the customs of indigenous peoples, and the dignity and courage of native-born Africans, the novel’s heroes. In her tale of the rebellion and tragic fate of a noble and heroic African prince, and of his wife Imoinda, Behn not only wrote the first English novel, but – nearly two centuries before Uncle Tom’s Cabin – the first work of fiction to denounce the institution of slavery