《Just a Song》简介：

“Song Lyric,” ci, remains one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry. From the early eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth century, song lyric evolved from an impromptu contribution in a performance practice to a full literary genre, in which the text might be read more often than performed. Young women singers, either indentured or private entrepreneurs, were at the heart of song practice throughout the period; the authors of the lyrics were notionally mostly male. A strange gender dynamic arose, in which men often wrote in the voice of a woman and her imagined feelings, then appropriated that sensibility for themselves.

As an essential part of becoming literature, a history was constructed for the new genre. At the same time the genre claimed a new set of aesthetic values to radically distinguish it from older “Classical Poetry,” shi. In a world that was either pragmatic or moralizing (or both), song lyric was a discourse of sensibility, which literally gave a beautiful voice to everything that seemed increasingly to be disappearing in the new Song dynasty world of righteousness and public advancement.

《Just a Song》摘录：

If we wonder why song lyrics gradually became so popular, this is part of the answer: songs constructed a space figuratively "outside the empire", or a space for the self in which the empire was irrelevant and unmentioned. Only in the world of song lyric do they have such a power, defined against official schedules.

《Just a Song》目录：

Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Setting the Stage
1. Early Circulation
2. Origins
II. The Early and Mid-Eleventh Century
3. The Yuezhang ji and Liu Yong
4. The Xiaoling Collections (I)
5. The Xiaoling Collections (II)
6. Yan Jidao
III. The Age of Su Shi
7. Su Shi
8. The Generation after Su Shi
9. Su Shi’s Protégés
10. Qin Guan
11. He Zhu
12. Zhou Bangyan
IV. Into the Twelfth Century
13. Recovering a History
14. The Last Generation of the Northern Song and On
Conclusion by Way of Continuing
Reference Matter
Appendix A: The Manuscripts of Feng Yansi
Appendix B: Lyrics Adrift
Appendix C: The “High Style” and Its Opposites
Bibliography and Abbreviations
Index
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