HIST 268: Warriors and Outlaws in China and England: Water Margin and Robin Hood (HC): Visual Sources

To find journal articles about art history topics, use Art Index as well as the  multi-disciplinary databases, JSTOR and Proquest Research Library.

Examples of journal articles include:

Authenticity and the Expanding Market in Chen Hongshou's Seventeenth-Century Printed Playing Cards.  

Tamara Bentley.  Artibus Asiae 69, 1 (2009): 147-188.  See pages 153-163 concerning Water Margin illustrations on cards.

Abstract:  Well-known Chinese painter and print designer Chen Hongshou (1598–1652) produced innovative painting and prints, which played upon ideas of authenticity to appeal to new constellations of markets. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, art audiences (including audiences for prints) had expanded well beyond the circumscribed milieu of the elite. Chen evinces a highly flexible approach to patronage, mixing elite patrons, quickly executed single figures and tailored literal portraits, print products, ready mades, and studio copies. In his Venerating Antiquity card set, into which he built himself from a multiplicity of angles, there are signs of the conflict between principled authenticity and commerce, public and personal enrichment. By visually identifying himself with both the highest suit (the most money-idolizing) and the lowest suit (the most impoverished) in the set, he appears to critique at once his own devotion to commerce and his poverty as one of the yimin (leftover subjects loyal to the last regime).

Re-visions of Shuihu Women in Chinese Theatre and Cinema  

Jing Shen. China Review 7, 1 (2007): 105-127.

Abstract:   The classical Chinese novel Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin), which was created in the fourteenth century and edited in the sixteenth century, has germinated many visual adaptations. The Water Margin, which foregrounds brotherhood, depicts only a few women characters.1 Most sensuous women in this narrative cause the heroes' withdrawal from society. The adaptations that concern this group of female characters reflect on the conventions of the visual form chosen and the ideology of the form's historical time. Such developing adaptations expand the interpretive capacity of these characters, who are primarily portrayed as evil influences in the novel.2 This paper proposes to examine the depiction of Zhang Zhenniang, the most moral heroine, and that of Pan Jinlian, the notorious adulteress, in relation to the corresponding male heroes in chuanqi drama, cinema and modern and contemporary drama, and to demonstrate how the socio-historical context and conventions of art forms shape the productions.

The 'Tale of Wu Song' in Chinese Popular Prints. 

Boris Riftin.  CHINOPERL Papers No. 27 (2007) pages 107-139.

Summary: Describes how folk artists illustrated episodes from the great vernacular novels, and analyzes their contents.

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Portrait of Patricia Driscoll as Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood, 

a British television series, 1955-1959 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)