Author(s)

Xujun Lei, Rongjuan Duan

Corresponding Author

Xujun Lei

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, more and more scholars, represented by Forceville, a media scholar at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, have been committed to absorbing relevant knowledge from other disciplines, and expanding the study of conceptual metaphor which pertains to the field of purely linguistics to interdisciplinary and cross-domain multimodal metaphor. In the past 30 years, the works adopting multimodal metaphor theory were mainly focused on the fields of advertising, pictures, movies, videos, etc., however, studies conducted on textual literary works are extremely few. As one of the four masterpieces in ancient China, A Dream of Red Mansions is known as the “Grand View Garden” of Chinese language arts. And metaphor is one of the most impressive rhetorical devices. The name, scenery, color, and other descriptions involved in the book vividly unveil the charm of multimodal discourse metaphor, especially in the aspect of etiquette. This work, as an encyclopedia of Chinese feudal society, is a collection of traditional culture. That is to say, behaviors and expressions of people from all walks of life in the entire feudal society are fully reflected in the book. Various scenes, such as dinner, mothering, sacrifices and etc. have provided us with a wide approach to explore the etiquette of Chinese feudal society through the multimodal metaphor. The purpose of this study is to apply the theory of multimodal metaphor to analyze A Dream of Red Mansions with etiquette as the foothold, so as to provide a new perspective for the studies of A Dream of Red Mansions.

Keywords

Multimodal Metaphor, A Dream of Red Mansions, Etiquette