This panel brings together an international group of scholars (Canada, China, Germany, and the United States), at a range of levels in professional development, to examine from a comparative viewpoint the concept of "illustration." The comparison involves not only China and Japan, but a comparison between genres as well, with case studies of illustrated editions of both dramatic texts (Chinese opera, Japanese kôwakamai) and narrative texts (Qing novels, Heian poem-tales). The purpose of this exercise will be, first, to interrogate the concept of "illustration," usually understood as a fairly faithful re-presentation of the verbal text’s meaning. Second, we hope to understand better the different ways pictures can form and direct a reader’s reception of a text, particularly how different kinds of pictures (portraits, mise en scene, landscape, or still-life) can respond to the differing reading strategies of a variety of readers.

Robert E. Hegel, Washington University

In my recent study Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 1998), I sketched in broad strokes the decline of illustrations for fiction from their artistic height during the last decades of the Ming through the late Qing period, speculating that these pictures came to serve a different function in relation to the text during that period. I concluded that in the early seventeenth century, pictures were intended to enhance the aesthetic experience of the fiction, whereas through the ensuing two centuries illustrations became irrelevant to the growing fashion to read fiction for escapist pleasure. In the present paper, I will address several mid-Qing developments: the apparent resurgence of interest in relatively complex and refined scenic illustrations in reprints by a few publishers (including Shuyetang of Suzhou), and the anomalous presence of character portrait illustrations in a manuscript edition of Lüye xianzong, an eighteenth-century novel. Through close readings of selected examples, I will complicate my earlier conclusions concerning how these illustrations seemingly shaped the reading of these works of fiction; I will concentrate on slow versus fast reading, close reading for appreciation of literary details versus skimming for pure amusement. Although my conclusions will be speculative, the quality and composition of these illustrations will demonstrate ever more of the complexity of book culture during the Qing.

Li-ling Hsiao, St. Anne’s College, Oxford

Among illustrated editions of Xixiang ji, the illustrations of the 1640 edition (Tianzhang Ge) are unique: first, they include two types of images—one with figures, one without—while other editions feature only one type of illustration; second, only the leading female character appears, while illustrations in other editions tend to include the full cast of the play. The two types of image are presented in pairs, one type following the other in alternation throughout the text in a pattern of conscious juxtaposition. The illustrator joins the figure images with correlative images of objects to create a new associative complex through which the action of the play is mediated. The illustrator suggests the ideal beauty of Yingying, for example, by pairing her image with those of books, brushes, paper, plums, orchids, and pines, all of which, in the tradition of Chinese literature and painting, have complex symbolic meanings and relationally inform her status in the play. The illustrator appropriates and manipulates these symbolic objects to propound a personal interpretation of the play, which differs, at points, with that apparently intended by the playwright. The illustrator offers the pictorial equivalent of textual commentary and in this way guides and sways the reader. This arrangement distinguishes this edition from all others and makes these illustrations a particularly interesting topic requiring a new critical approach, one that grasps text, image, and tradition as mutually informing elements in the creation of meaning.

Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia

Hishikawa Moronobu (ca. 1618–1694) is the first great Japanese woodblock print artist whose name has come down to us. While he produced paintings and single-sheet prints, it is as an illustrator that he is primarily known. But what does "illustration" mean for Moronobu and his time?

To explore this question, I will focus on two editions of the courtly poem-tale (uta-monogatari) Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), one a scholarly edition and the other a more popular text, translated into vernacular seventeenth-century Japanese. I will demonstrate how early Edo concepts of "illustration," as well as "translation," differ significantly from our own. We will see that this difference is in part due to a difference in how our two cultures value and evaluate visual and verbal representation as a whole. Finally, a clear understanding of just what "translation" meant in the 17th century will add important information to the on-going discussion of the function and meaning of the term "mitate" (a kind of parody) in the Edo period.

Melanie Trede, University of Heidelberg

The beginnings of a secular print culture on a large scale, replete with pictures, dates from the early modern period in Japan. While the limited editions of the exclusive Saga-bon of the early 17th century and the big production of jôruri puppet-theatre books of the latter half of the century have attracted scholarly attention, the woodblock printed pictures included in the repertoire of thirty-six extant kôwakamai ballad-dramas dating from the Kan’ei period (1630s) have escaped thorough visual analysis.

These popular performance pieces draw on narratives of the Kamakura period such as the Heike and Soga monogatari, which were believed to be historical accounts. The visual representation of Japanese past in the 17th century—arguably the first "century of historiography" in Japan—was constructed at a popular level by these books.