DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China

Anne Birrell author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:18th May '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China cover

This book, first published in 1988, compiles 77 songs and ballads (yüeh-fu) of early imperial China (200 BC – AD 300). Each song-text is newly translated and fully annotated and explicated. Dr Birrell deals systematically with problems of the earliest sources, dating, attribution, textual variants, multiforms, metre, generic title, song title and structure. This careful and thorough treatment is especially necessary for a corpus of anonymous popular texts which are often corrupt, structurally confusing, laconic and full of nonsense words and colloquialisms. Her introductory essay provides a socio-historical context for this material and charts its literary transmission, while singling out special characteristics of the genre, such as musical, oral and dramatic elements. The main text, arranged into eleven chapters plus an introduction, is supplemented by notes, appendices, maps, chronology, bibliography and index.

ISBN: 9780367770723

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 607g

238 pages