Editor: Pauline Yu, University of California Press, 1994

This collection is the first comprehensive treatment of the song lyric (tz'u) in China from its origins through the nineteenth century. Engaging issues of form, language, voice, and transmission, these essays explore the changing and frequently problematic situation of the tz'u over centuries of literary production. They articulate the common ground of critical discourse, focusing on concerns of gender and genre, that took shape in essays, anthologies, and the poems themselves.

Pauline Yu is Professor and Chair of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Irvine.

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Introduction:

Scholars of traditional Chinese literature long approached the history of literary genres with an assumption similar to that governing the study of other historical formations in the culture: that the subjects under study experienced life cycles of birth, development, and decline analogous to those putatively experienced by the particular dynasties in which they were putatively rooted. Thus, as political regimes could be seen to rise and fall organically in smooth chronological sequence, so too could literary forms be regarded as generating their own evolutionary genealogies of descent over time. The presumption that life cycles of dynasties and literary genres followed comparable and intertwined courses provided a convenient schema for literary periodization and reinforced long-standing historicist interpretations of individual texts as well, interpretations that remained compelling well into the twentieth century.

Given this powerful paradigm of the inevitable depletion and supersession of genres dynasty after dynasty, it should perhaps come as no surprise that even in the West a major conference on the tz'u , or song lyric, traditionally identified with the Sung dynasty, should follow one on shih poetry, conventionally linked with the T'ang. Both events took place at the Breckinridge Conference Center of Bowdoin College in York, Maine, under the generous sponsorship of the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, the first, Evolution of Shih Poetry from the Han through the T'ang, in June of 1982 and the second, Tz'u Poetry, in June of 1990.

However facetious this account of the origins of the papers collected in this volume may be, such well-entrenched views did contribute, throughout much of the twentieth century, to the development of a bibliography of dissertations and monographs by Western scholars on shih that is longer and deeper by far than that for tz'u . Even more significant, however, has been the song lyric's discursive position within the traditional Chinese hierarchy of genres. Long regarded as the "other" important form of Chinese poetry, it was almost always considered in distinction from the older, more authoritative, and supposedly more serious genre of shih , for a complex of reasons that this conference sought to explore.

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