A Study On The Description Of Clothing In Bai Xianyong 's Novels

As a typical embodiment in novels by Bai Xianyong, costumes become a key for people to understand his novel world. Hence, it is fair to say that, understanding of his costume description is highly valuable for research on Bai Xianyong’s novels. By virtue of the expressive function of costumes in literature, the costume description in Bai Xianyong’s novels forms unique "costume esthetics". An author shows preference for some objective performance objects because of multiple subjective factors. Due to many reasons such as family life, personal cultural & literary accomplishment and personal literary concepts, Bai Xianyong pays attention to costume description. Bai Xianyong’s costume description and components of his novels form closed relationship, mainly reflected in figure shaping, plot architecture and artistic space construction. Of course, as a contemporary writer with special identity and experiences, Bai Xianyong integrates costumes into creation, intending to convey deep themes by costume description rather than show pure and inane written description. Differences between past and nowadays, basic survival of humans, homosexuality and humans’ emotional dilemma as well as topics like identification are accurately conveyed in his novels thanks to costume description. Bai Xianyong conveys his thoughts about individuals, history and culture through costume description. On this basis, the paper will take costume description as the starting point; conduct systematic description and deep explanation of costume description involved in texts through detailed text reading; and try to discuss connotations of typical costume symbols and significance of costume description to Bai Xianyong’s novels.The paper is divided into introduction, subject and conclusion. Introduction mainly involves combing of relations between costumes and literature, as well as other contents such as overview, values and methods of research on costume description in Bai Xianyong’s novels. The subject will be divided into 3 parts. The first part discusses reasons why Bai Xianyong describes costumes; respectively analyzes his life experience and family background, relations between him and Chinese traditional literature and literary concepts boasted by Bai Xianyong; and discusses influences brought by these factors to his costume description. The second part discusses relations between costume description and novel components, mainly including novel figure elements and plot elements analyzed from figures’ status, character traits and destiny implication as well as artistic space elements analyzed from costume image space and costume color image space. The third part intensively discusses internal relations between costume description and theme expression in Bai Xianyong’s novels, mainly from 3 themes including "differences between past and nowadays", attention to living dilemma and identification, In combination with novel text, historical background, writer’s experiences, specific costume symbols and relevant theories, the subject comprehensively and deeply researches costume description in Bai Xianyong’s novels. The conclusion will summarize opinions in the whole paper. Bai Xianyong’s costume description forms an independent artistic world, has very high aesthetic values and grants his novels with unique artistic charm.