This thesis uses the concept of righteous justice found within The Water Margin and the legends of Robin Hood to analyze conflicts of differing ideologies of justice and morality between the ruling class and that of the common people. From these conflicts this thesis further expounds the idea of righteous justice on three points: 1) Examines political themes and portrayals of righteous justice within the content of The Water Margin and the legends of Robin Hood; 2) Performs a character analysis on how characters identify with the authority systems of both natural law and king¡¦s law based upon the western and Chinese ideals of righteous and public justice; 3) Uses the Marxist theory of history to discuss the formation of ideologies of the common people and how they identify with the concept of righteous justice. Further, this thesis examines the way in which the heroes of Mt. Liang and those of Greenwood forest are viewed by the different classes, and from this examination the manner in which the phenomenon of righteous justice becomes viewed as a legitimate form of justice representing the common people. From these points, this thesis discusses the ways in which righteous justice found among both western and Chinese legends creates moral exceptions within a society.

《水滸傳》的創作從南宋初年至明代中葉，這四百多年來流傳的水滸故事，經過說書人的講演鋪陳、文人的潤飾增色，逐漸成熟完整，匯聚成一部精彩絕倫的通俗小說。小說設計了一百零八位英雄，這些好漢被賦予了不同出身、獨特相貌，以及各式穿著，繪製出一幅多彩多姿的水滸圖卷。《水滸傳》在人物登場時，往往以一套贊賦介紹人物從頭到腳的衣著，為讀者在腦海中畫出一個具體而鮮明的形象。由於「服飾」是一個人的「社會肌膚」，透過「服飾」我們可得知其身分地位、審美觀念、性格投射與所處的社會風尚，甚至能反映群體文化。《水滸傳》服飾琳瑯滿目，筆者透過文本的分析，將一百零八好漢的衣著，分為首服、上衣、下裳與足服、腰佩四類，逐一考掘形制內容、演化，宋、元、明三代服制與人物的穿用取向。其次探討服飾的質料與顏色，將質料分為棉麻、絲織、毛皮、金屬四類，研究服飾表現的物質文化；服色則採紅、青、白、黑、黃五色分述，闡發《水滸傳》服飾的穿搭美學。把人物服飾對應《水滸傳》的創作背景，瞭解小說反映出來宋、元、明三代紡織工藝的發達，帶動商品經濟活絡，形成豐富多樣的衣飾時尚以及崇奢僭禮的風氣。最後將服飾與人物形象結合探討，論述小說如何運用服飾勾勒《水滸傳》臉譜，研究服飾對人物外在的身分界定，與文本內在的書寫意涵。本論文從服飾的角度審視《水滸傳》，從中歸納出服飾是人物刻劃的途徑，是小說渲染情節的方法，也是社會風俗的具體反映，更是梁山好漢犯禁思想的表現，總結出《水滸傳》是通俗小說服飾書寫的轉型階段。 / The creation of The Water Margin went through a roughly 400-year span, starting from the beginning of Southern Song to the mid-Ming Dynasty. Stories of The Water Margin, performed, polished, refined and compiled by storytellers and poets, were made into one epic popular fiction, within which 108 outlaws, endowed with distinct backgrounds, appearances, and dress, made an animated landscape of Water Margin. The Water Margin introduces most of its characters’ complete outfits through a set of words of praise on their debuts, thereby portraying solid, bright images in its readers’ mind. Dress are socialized skin from which we tell one’s social status, aesthetics, projected nature, contemporary trends, and even collective culture from those of others’. The Water Margin presents 108 outlaws in a wide array of clothing which, in my textual analyses, was categorized into caps, garments, skirts and footwear, and waist ornaments. I explore the contents of their designs and transformations over time, and how people in Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties designed and decided their dress in terms of wearing and functioning. Next, I’d discuss the textile—categorized into cotton and gunny, silk, hide and leather, and metal, in order to study the material culture embedded in dress—along with colors—red, cyan, white, black, and yellow included, so as to elaborate on the aesthetics of dressing. Comparing dress with the social context of The Water Margin’s creation gives insight to the highly-developed textile crafting in Song, Yuan, and Ming Dynasty, a crafting which promoted a booming commodity economy and thereby formed a miscellaneous dressing fashion and a luxury-worshiping, etiquette-violating atmosphere. Combining dress with the characters, I reason how each figure was shaped with what he or she wore, and study how one’s dressing defined his/her extrinsic identity and the textual implications inherited in the fiction. This thesis aims at scrutinizing The Water Margin through dress, concluding that dressing is a path to characters’ depictions, a manner with which the plot was embellished, a concrete reflection on social customs, as well as a representation of the 108 outlaws’ thinking of breaking prohibitions. The Water Margin, therefore, was at the stage of dressing depiction’s transformation in popular fictions.

This thesis examines three aspects of the commentary edition of the Chinese vernacular novel Shuihu Zhuan written by Ming Dynasty literatus Jin Shengtan (ca. 1610-1661), analyzing three of the most innovative features that the commentary brings to our understanding of the novel, and what Jin Shengtan desired for the reader of his commentary to understand. The first chapter looks at a series of techniques that Jin outlines in the preliminary "How to Read" section of the commentary (dufa), where the techniques are shown to be very similar in focus and style to the literary theory of narratology as written about by Gerard Genette through a sample comparison of five of the techniques with varying characteristics of narratology. The second chapter looks at how Jin Shengtan constructs the image of the author, Shi Nai'an, through both his interlineal commentary (jiapi) and his preliminary chapter commentary (zongpi). We see through this analysis that Jin Shengtan has gone against the tradition of shu er bu zuo -- a Confucian tradition that relegates the position of the author to the background of his work -- and has brought the author into a position of prominence through his construction of the image of an unparalleled genius. The third and final chapter looks at the idea of "heroism" (xia) and how Jin's commentary reworks the way many of the primary characters of the novel and their heroic actions are seen and interpreted, focusing especially on the characters of Wu Song, Lu Zhishen, Song Jiang and Li Kui, where we see that Jin's commentary focuses on parallels between the heroes such as Wu Song and Lu Zhishen in the first portion of the novel, while switching to a more juxtapositional perspective in the latter half of the novel through Song Jiang and Li Kui. / Graduate / 0305 / 0332 / mblsm00@gmail.com