| How does a non-visual medium like the novel capture the excitement of the martial-arts scene? How can printed words ever hope to express the thrill of clashing swords and the exhilaration of swift physical movement? In this study, I demonstrate how late-nineteenth-century martial-arts novels employed the suggestion of sound to allow the reader to experience the printed text as a pleasurable acoustic spectacle. In emphasizing the importance of the sensation of sound in the martial-arts novel, I will redirect scholarly attention from the tasteful and sometimes cerebral concerns of the literati elite, to the more visceral, popular reading habits of the "middlebrow" crowd. In doing so, I will reinterpret the storyteller persona, a crucial rhetorical figure in most pre-modern Chinese vernacular literature, by showing how the storyteller not solely represented, as argued before, an abstract moral point of view or a disembodied structural device, but also functioned as the embodiment of auditory entertainment. By emphasizing the importance of sound in bringing the excitement of the martial-arts novel to life, I will not only shed new light on our understanding of late-nineteenth-century reading practices. I also will argue for the importance of sound to late-imperial representations of the urban landscape, and furthermore suggest how the writing of sound has implications for our understanding of the interaction between local (Beijing) and a broader imperial culture in the nineteenth century. Finally I will suggest ways in which the printing of the storyteller's voice may have had an impact on the rise of modern print-culture in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. |
