Li Cunxin's Story in Different Text Types

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Li Cunxin’s Story as a Picture Book Li and Spudvilas use unique features of a picture book in ‘The Peasant Prince’ to communicate Li’s autobiography ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’ to a new audience. The unique visual features used in the picture book to communicate the autobiography to a new audience are the change in colour and shades, the change in medium, the use of different brush strokes and lastly the use of body language and facial expressions. Literary features used in ‘The Peasant Prince” include: parallel stories to the storyline in the book, varying perspectives from third person to first, limited text and personification. The picture book ‘The Peasant Prince’ has many points where the colour, and shade changes which is used to portray the Li’s emotion and the aesthetics of the world surrounding him to a new, younger audience. In the early pages, the colours are faint, dreary blues. These dull colours are evident on the page of the family sleeping together with lifelessly pale facial colours and an almost translucent blanket. These pages of inert colour explain the section of ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’ where life is a constant struggle. Illustrating these times from the autobiography is Li’s statement “… my parents, like everyone else, were desperately fighting for survival” (Cunxin, L p9), these times are communicated in the picture book through the unique feature of colour. The colours begin to transition when he is selected for Madame Mao’s Ballet Academy into browns and yellows to convey Li’s changing emotion. They become bright yellows and rich blues on the page where Li is dancing without enforcement but for individual goals of improving. The same point of Li’s life in the autobiography uses ballet jargon including “tour en l’air” (Cunxin, L p208) along with a simile, “My improvements and small achievements over the next few months were like winning battles

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