本文透過傳奇《讀書聲》中出現的奇異生物，探索了帝國晚期的中國對於非人他者的想像。全劇行至中段，元初書生宋儒發現自己被抛棄在一座遥遠的荒島上。在那裏，他被一隻人熊救起並與之結爲伴侣，這是一隻勇猛卻又充滿善意的類熊生物。儘管兩者的結合時日不長，但是藉由婚姻，邊緣化角色被置於中心位置（既是故事的、又是帝國的中心），這樣的情節在全劇爲數不多，因而具有重要意義：此外，待到結局之時，書生與船夫之女和蒙古官員之女雙雙成婚。然而，當這樣的雙重婚姻爲有效跨越文人與商人、漢人與蠻夷之間的差異提供了可能，人熊的悲劇命運卻又消弭了任何跨越人獸界綫的機會。换言之，隨著商人和蒙古人成爲新的社會群體的一部分，人熊卻標誌着一條必需的界限。劇中，正是這條界限使得社會與民族的他者擺脱了低賤與野蠻的標籤。與此同時，新社群對於人熊的排斥也並非無憂；通過顛覆傳奇普遍對完整性的强調，《讀書聲》戲劇性地展示了清初秩序重建所必經的分裂與排斥。

This article explores the late imperial imagination of the nonhuman other by way of a curious creature that appears in the southern drama Dushu sheng. Midway through the play, set in the early years of the Yuan dynasty, the young literatus protagonist is abandoned on a remote island, where he is rescued by a renxiong, a fierce yet empathetic bear-like creature that takes him as its mate. Though short-lived, their union is one of several in the play in which marginal characters are brought into the (narrative and imperial ) center through marriage: by the end of the play, the protagonist is wed to both the daughter of a boatman and the daughter of a Mongol official. But while this double marriage offers the possibility of a productive overcoming of the distinctions between scholar and merchant and between Chinese and barbarian, the tragic fate of the renxiong forecloses any possibility of overcoming that which divides man and beast. Rather, as the human community is expanded to include merchant and Mongol, the renxiong serves as the necessary limit, allowing the play to rescue these social and ethnic others from baseness and barbarity. At the same time, the exclusion of the renxiong from this new community is not untroubled; in resisting the genre’s compulsive imposition of wholeness, Dushu sheng dramatizes the fractures and exclusions that made possible the restoration of order in the early Qing.