A Study On The Image Narration Of Wanli’s Peony Pavilion

The illustrations of the opera prints of "The Peony Pavilion" during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty are an important part of the history of Chinese woodblock prints,and their narrative style of mutual composition influenced the development of book illustration images in later generations.It can be said that the Wanli Peony Pavilion occupies a pivotal position in the history of Chinese art prints.This paper takes85 images from three illustrated books of The Peony Pavilion during the Wanli period as the object of study,and studies them comparatively by means of iconographic and narrative research methods,on the basis of which the inner logical relationship between the illustrations and texts of The Peony Pavilion in Wanli is explored,and different art images derived from the same text are studied and analyzed.The introductory section of the dissertation briefly describes the origin of the topic,the current state of research,and the proposed research method.The first chapter of the dissertation gives an overview of the historical background of the formation of the illustrated version of The Peony Pavilion in Wanli and the related publications.The second and third chapters are the main parts of the thesis.In the second chapter,the three illustrated books of Wanli’s Peony Pavilion are analyzed in terms of their composition,characters and narrative functions.The third chapter,based on the phenomenon of "multiple pictures in one drama",provides a deeper interpretation of the similarities and differences among the three illustrations of Wanli Peony Pavilion and explains the reasons for the differences.The fourth chapter analyzes the transformation from textual narrative to pictorial narrative in Wanli’s Peony Pavilion,namely,the transformation of pictorial content to textual narrative,the juxtaposition of multiple spatial and temporal textual narrative spaces in the pictorial display space,the selection of pictorial narrative to textual narrative,and the overflow and omission of pictorial narrative.The remaining part of the dissertation examines several other issues,such as the changing trend of the images of the Wanli Peony Pavilion after the Ming and Qing dynasties,and the gradual decline of the illustrated version of the Peony Pavilion after the Wanli period,which is mainly reflected in the quantity and quality of the illustrations.After that,in the concluding part of the thesis,the possibility of the future development of the study of the illustration of the Peony Pavilion opera prints in the direction of the art discipline is foreseen.