Included among the cache of manuscripts preserved in the Tun-huang caves in northwest Kansu province and brought to light at the beginning of the twentieth century are numerous examples of tz'u written to set tunes on a variety of topics-ranging from the joys of love to the sorrows of war-that can be dated to early in the eighth century.
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Early tz'u were embedded in a popular tradition of songs, largely of anonymous authorship, that were performed by courtesans, professional musicians, and other private entertainers. Thereafter the genre underwent an eclipse until a major revival began during the early seventeenth century and continued for the next three hundred years as is well known, the form continues to be widely composed today. The form took shape in the T'ang and reached maturity during the Five Dynasties and Sung. 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.Īs the translation "song lyric" suggests, tz'u (or ch'ü-tzu-tz'u, "words to songs") are verses in irregular line-lengths, often stanzaic, written-or, literally, "filled in"-so that they could be sung to existing melodies. Even more significant, however, has been the song lyric's discursive position within the traditional Chinese hierarchy of genres. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. Voices of the Song Lyric in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994.
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