Sound Rising from the Paper : Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination / Paize Keulemans.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keulemans, Paize, author.

Series:

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 369.

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 369

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chinese fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

Chinese fiction.

Martial arts fiction, Chinese--History and criticism.

Martial arts fiction, Chinese.

Sound in literature.

Sound--Social aspects--China.

Sound.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 324 pages :) illustrations ;

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

Leiden; Boston : BRILL, 2014.

Other Title:

Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination

Place of Publication:

Boston : Harvard University Asia Center, 2014.

Summary:

Chinese martial arts novels from the late nineteenth century are filled with a host of suggestive sounds. Characters cuss and curse in colorful dialect accents, vendor calls ring out from bustling marketplaces, and martial arts action scenes come to life with the loud clash of swords and the sounds of bodies colliding. What is the purpose of these sounds, and what is their history? In Sound Rising from the Paper, Paize Keulemans answers these questions by critically reexamining the relationship between martial arts novels published in the final decades of the nineteenth century and earlier storyteller manuscripts. He finds that by incorporating, imitating, and sometimes inventing storyteller sounds, these novels turned the text from a silent object into a lively simulacrum of festival atmosphere, thereby transforming the solitary act of reading into the communal sharing of an oral performance. By focusing on the role sound played in late nineteenth-century martial arts fiction, Keulemans offers alternatives to the visual models that have dominated our approach to the study of print culture, the commercialization of textual production, and the construction of the modern reading subject.

Contents:

Acts of ventriloquism: literati appropriations of the storyteller's voice in the late Ming and late Qing

Imagining a local audience: Beijing tales and the brandname recognition of the storyteller

Shi Yukun

Sounds that sell: vendor calls and the acoustic aesthetics of the marketplace

Listening to the martial arts scene: onomatopoeia in the three knights series

The cosmopolitan teller of tales: cross-talking and the imitation of regional dialect accents

Sound and space: the acoustic architecture of Wan Kang's tale of romance and heroism

Coda: Pow!.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [283]-314) and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781684175444

1684175445

OCLC:

1132229519

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9781684175444 DOI