The development of commercial publishing in the late Ming Dynasty facilitated the wide dissemination of detective novels and made their illustrations an important narrative medium. However, existing scholarship has focused primarily on the generic features of detective novels, the image of upright officials, and legal culture, while paying insufficient attention to the pictorial structure and narrative significance of the illustrations themselves. Taking Yu Xiangdou’s , Vol.1, and its illustrations as its object of study, this article employs Panofsky’s three-tiered iconological method to analyze scene space, bodily posture, and key objects. It argues that this set of illustrations actively participates in case narration through node-based configuration and stylized visual language, and, within the dual context of commercial publishing and legal-moral instruction in the late Ming Dynasty, constructs a legal imagination in which wrongs may be redressed, evil must be punished, and upright officials can be relied upon. This article provides a workable methodological framework for applying Panofsky’s iconology to the analysis of continuous illustrations in premodern China, and offers a useful perspective for understanding the generative mechanisms of illustration in traditional Chinese fiction.
목차
Abstract I. Introduction II. Illustrations of Ming Dynasty Detective Novels 1. Research Value of Late Ming Detective Novel Illustrations 2. Text and Case Overview III. Illustrations of Ming Dynasty Detective Novels 1. Previous Iconographic Description 2. Iconographic Analysis 3. Iconological Interpretation IV. Conclusion Reference