The Comparison Of The Cowherd And Weaver Myth Story’s Transmutation In Both Image And Text Before Tang Dynasty

The Cowherd and Weaver story is a popular myth all the time.As festivals are becoming more and more commercialized nowadays,Qixi Festival has also been widely spread because of the influence of modern media.On the other side,it has also attracted many scholars to research and discuss.However,the academic circles have always paid more attention to the transmutation of text records.Although there are some research on the folk customs of Qixi Festival,the image records haven ’t been discussed much.Most of the research only uses images as the added evidence for textual materials and rarely analyzes the details of images.To remedy the gap of individual and systematic research on the images of the Cowherd and Weaver myth,this thesis selects the pre-Tang period when this myth gradually appeared and finalized,and analyzes the transmutation in both textual records and images in order to trying to correct the current view that the text and image transmutation are taken for granted as consistent.It also discusses a mural in Deokheung-ri Tomb,analyses the function and cultural background of it.The first chapter mainly introduce the previous research on this topic.The second chapter divides the textual records of the Cowherd and Weaver myth before Tang Dynasty into three stages,discusses how cowherd and weaver turned into myth from two simple constellations,and the secularization tendency of this myth story.The third chapter focuses on the transmutation of the images under this topic.It doesn’t only discuss how those transmutations happened,also compares the transmutations in both texts and image records.The last chapter is a detailed analysis of the mural of the Cowherd and the Weaver in Deokheung-ri Tomb and discusses the characteristics of the image and the reasons for its formation.As a way of expression and recording which is different from texts,images have their special artistic tension,and they can also provide us with another research perspective to explore national cultural memory.