Yihan Ding

Yihan Ding

26 May 2023

Late Ming Dynasty, The Romance of West Chamber, Elegance and vulgarity, Edition illustration.

The illustrations in The Romance of West Chamber edition in the Ming Dynasty were traced back to the novel The Biography of Ying Ying written by Yuan Zhen in the Tang Dynasty. After the Dong Xixiang in the Jin Dynasty, Wang Shifu, a dramatist of the Yuan Dynasty, adapted it into a drama and sung it, and finally it was widely carved into popular reading materials in the Ming Dynasty. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the number of printed copies of it was too large to enumerate. This paper starts with the creative subject and content of the illustrations of The Romance of West Chamber edition in the late Ming Dynasty, and analyzes the mutual learning relationship between elegance and vulgarity in the production process of the illustrations in The Romance of West Chamber editions in that period from the outside to the inside.

© 2023, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

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