On The Narrative Of Illustrations In Romance Of The Western Chamber In Ming Dynasty

This dissertation studies the illustrations of Romance of the Western Chamber printed in the Ming Dynasty, tries to describe the connotation and narrative features of book illustrations, and drama the evolution track of the illustration and text’s relationship.This paper mainly investigates the narrative function of drama illustration. Taking the illustrations in Romance of the Western Chamber in Ming Dynasty for example, paper compares drama illustrations with drama text, makes a detailed analysis in the narrative of illustrations, and tries to grasp the basic characteristics and context of the ancient drama illustrations narration. Undoubtedly, the significance of this studies is important, which can help us form a new understanding of the narrative, the drama history, literature history.This dissertation is composed of five chapters, along with the Introduction and Epilogue.Introduction traces the current research of drama illustrations, and introduces the main ideas and innovation of the dissertation.Chapter1explores illustrations’history of Romance of the Western Chamber in the Ming Dynasty, and introduces the three stages of the version development. The paper selects four classic illustration versions ofRomance of the Western Chamber in Ming Dynasty, and analyzes their style characteristic and the narrative form.Chapter2and Chapter3are the specific analysis to the narrative of illustrations to Romance of the Western Chamber in Ming Dynasty.Chapter2detailed studies the narrative of drama illustrations, by analyzing the opera characters, story plot, stories scenes, as well as Metaphor narrative. Through the comparison of the text and illustration, this paper discusses how the illustration match the text in the narration. All of these can enhance our understanding to the illustration and text’s relationship.Chapter3inspects the social thought and the trend of the times reflected in the drama illustrations. On the one hand, Yingying’ image changes from "fat beauty" to "thin beauty", reflecting the change of social aesthetic consciousness from Tang dynasty to Ming dynasty; On the other hand, there’s a big difference existing in characters’clothes, action, proportion of size in the illustrations, revealing the social rank idea in the reality. In a word, this section helps us to understand the illustration from a broader perspective.The epilogue includes three parts:the first part sums up the two different narrative forms of drama illustrations, according to the close relationship between illustrations and text; the second part reflects the defect in the narrative of the opera illustration, through comparing the Zhangsheng’s image in text and illustrations. The third part, affirmed the value and significance of drama illustration narration for narrative history, illustration history and literature history.