Abstract: With rich narrative layers and plural interpretive possibilities, The Divorce, a short story by Lu Xun (1881-1936), has attracted six illustrators - including Zhao Yannian, Ding Cong and Fan Zeng - to produce stylistically diverse works. Employing visual strategies such as black―white contrast, body language, environmental symbols, sequential narrative, and impressionistic blank―leaving, the illustrators re-present the class oppression, gender discipline and power structures depicted in the story. Three types of interaction - complementarity, competition and gaps - emerge between the text and the images. Rather than passively reproducing the written content, the illustrations constitute independent artistic re-creations with their own signifying functions. In the process of re-presenting “the most fertile instant,” gaps between text and image inevitably arise due to medium specificity and the illustrators'subjective interpretations. Based on Zhao Xianzhang's theory of verbal―pictorial intertextuality, this study systematically examines the mechanisms through which images reconstruct textual meaning from five distinct dimensions.

Key words: Lu Xun (1881-1936), The Divorce, visual interpretation, textual reconstruction, verbal―pictorial intertextuality