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^[1] 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.

As 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. The form took shape in the T'ang and reached maturity during the Five Dynasties and Sung. 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. 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. 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. Approximately two-thirds of those tune titles, moreover, appear in a catalog of musical works compiled at the imperial court during the same period, suggesting that tz'u were being composed and performed by entertainers at the palace as well, and indicating the wide range of audiences to which they appealed. With the onset of political instability in the middle of the eighth century, many of these court musicians dispersed, moving away from the capital and relocating to the burgeoning entertainment quarters of cities throughout the empire, where, in halls of often immense proportions, song lyrics continued to be produced and performed. Much of the further development of the genre was rooted in the interaction between courtesan-entertainers and members of the lite-

[1] Papers from that conference were published in a volume entitled The Vitality of the Lyric Voice : Shih Poetry from the Late Han to the T'ang , ed. Shuen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

rati that flourished in these urban locales during the late eighth and ninth centuries.

It was within contexts such as these that song lyric forms, once largely of unknown authorship or composed by the performers themselves, came gradually to be appropriated for use by the literati class. In many instances they were written by men using assumed female personas and then given to women singers to perform at banquets or parties, thereby often putting the woman singer in the position of expressing through the lyrics her desire for a man—and indeed, since the lyrics' writers were usually the same literary men who attended such parties, the singer might well have been compelled to speak her longing to the very person who had written the lyrics. From these beginnings, not surprisingly, issues of gender and sexual relationships acquired great importance in the genre, far more so than in any other kind of Chinese writing. Since the form often employed the conventional persona of a woman, it became strongly associated with "femininity" and presented a rich repertoire of expected response from women (expected, that is, in the imaginations of men). Moreover, one of the most famous lyricists of the Sung dynasty was a woman, and by the seventeenth century song lyrics had become especially important as vehicles for women writers, the literary genre in which they could most comfortably engage in poetic exchanges with each other or with men.

During the eleventh century the scope of the form broadened to include a male voice and many topics that had traditionally been associated with purely male experience and, indeed, that had earlier been addressed in shih . As the "other" genre, however, the form in which one could speak of sentiments and responses normally excluded from the more public and elevated shih , even this male version of the genre often sought to present what were considered to be the most delicate aspects of sensibility and the human affections. Such distinctions became more acute as the tz'u matured and its rigorous technical demands engendered a concern with formal perfection, leading to the development of a mode of connoisseurship quite distinct from the critique of shih .

Both the gender associations of the form and the connoisseurship of its stylistic refinements led to much theorizing on the distinctiveness of tz'u relative to its competing verse form, shih . To speak of it as the "other" form of Chinese poetry is to convey precisely the sense of the genre held by traditional writers and readers of the song lyric. The act of articulating or defining its alterity became therefore a central concern of tz'u criticism. From this process grew a large body of critical discourse, along with numerous anthologies, all of which sought to develop

a canon of the genre, to valorize the form and write its history, and to enumerate the ways in which the fine points of its language corresponded perfectly to the fine points of human sentiment.

This detailed inscription, however marginal or precarious, into the literary and textual tradition succeeded, quite incidentally, in effacing almost completely the original music to which the song lyrics had been composed. Although the introduction of new songs into the repertoire was clearly instrumental in the development of new and longer song lyrics in the first half of the eleventh century, only a few decades later some critics would complain of what they perceived to be an increasing inattention to the music itself. Musical notation now survives for only seventeen lyrics, all composed by the Southern Sung poet Chiang K'uei (1155–1221) and preserved in three eighteenth-century manuscripts—whose copyists even then no longer understood the system Chiang had used, and were simply reproducing (in different versions) a manuscript dating from the mid-fourteenth century. Rather than denoting pitch values, Chiang's tablature notation appears to refer to fingerings on the Chinese flute and is of limited value in restoring the original music of a larger body of songs. Notational systems varied widely from person to person, school to school, and region to region, and Chiang K'uei was in any event probably exceptional among literati in entering—by employing a written system at all—what was more comfortably the province of trained musicians. It is largely owing to oral transmission, similarly tied to geographical location and specific figures or schools, that conventions of chanting and performance have survived to the present day.

Although some volumes of translations of tz'u and a scattering of books and articles, along with conventional and cursory treatments of the form in histories of Chinese literature, had appeared prior to 1974, systematic modern Western scholarship on the genre can be said to date only from the publication in that year of the late James J. Y. Liu's Major Lyricists of the Northern Sung , which contained texts, translations, and critical discussions of a few famous works by a few famous poets. Shortly thereafter tz'u studies began to flourish in a handful of North American universities, where a steady stream of theses and dissertations was produced over the next decade, covering what had come to be identified as the major figures in the genre and laying the groundwork for the study of the form in English.^[2] What was essential in establishing this founda-

[2] These works include: Shuen-fu Lin, The Transformation of the Chinese Lyrical Tradition: Chiang K'uei and Southern Sung Tz'u Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); John Timothy Wixted, The Song Poetry of Wei Chuang (836 –910 A.D.) (Tempe: Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 1978); Kang-i Sun Chang, The Evolutionof Chinese Tz'u Poetry: From Late T'ang to Northern Sung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Daniel Bryant, Lyric Poets of the Southern T'ang: Feng Yen-ssu, 903 –960, and Li Yü, 937 –978 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1982); Lois Fusek, tr., Among the Flowers: The Hua-chien chi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Marsha L. Wagner, The Lotus Boat: The Origins of Chinese Tz'u Poetry in T'ang Popular Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Grace S. Fong, Wu Wenying and the Art of Southern Song Ci Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and David R. McCraw, Chinese Lyricists of the Seventeenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990). In addition, Stephen C. Soong has edited a volume of essays and translations titled Song Without Music: Chinese Tz'u Poetry (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1980).

tion, of course, was the focus on selected individual writers or groups, and while this aggregate of monographs as a whole provides remarkably well-integrated coverage of the development and florescence of the genre from the late T'ang through the Southern Sung dynasty, it was the intention of no one author to write a comprehensive literary history of tz'u or to address the larger issues the form might raise.

These were some of the primary aims of the 1990 conference at Breckinridge, which sought, in addition, to expand the temporal frame of studies on tz'u beyond the Sung dynasty and to broaden the focus beyond critical examinations of major figures. Participants ranged from specialists in the genre or in Sung poetry more generally to individuals who had previously paid little attention to either. Although papers had been commissioned to fall into three general categories, no one anticipated that the essays would in the event prove to be engaging the same set of issues, albeit on apparently disparate topics or from quite different perspectives. Thus, the conference as a whole succeeded in articulating a common ground of discourse on the song lyric that the participants agreed could only have been realized collectively: that overlapping concerns of genre and gender have structured critical discussion of the song lyric almost from its very beginnings. These concerns have focused on the language of the form and in particular on the problem of the voice of the poem. This is a problem rooted in the song lyric's own origins in performance, especially performance of an expression of highly mediated desire, and the consequent difficulties of establishing or giving voice to an unmediated self (which had been the accepted mandate of the shih , or short poem).

The essays collected in this volume engage these issues from a variety of perspectives and critical approaches, ranging from close readings of song lyrics to feminist, historical, and textual studies. The "voices" of the volume's title recalls the origins of the tz'u as lyrics that were sung, and sung to music that, even after its disappearance, left a powerful

legacy in terms of the shape and contexts of the genre. The word speaks as well to what became a central problem for a form that had first been written to be sung in the performance of a role: although it subsequently came to be viewed as more capable than shih of accurately tracing the cuts and turns of human emotion, it could never shake off doubts about the genuineness of expressed emotion that had been ineluctably implanted from the original context of entertainment. Voiced by women more often than were shih and plumbing depths of sentiment left unexplored by the dominant poetic genre, the song lyric was also subject to a persistent disjunction between its discursive position within the Chinese critical tradition and some other, perhaps more legitimate, place. Needless to say, the problematic nature of that situation was intimately related to the very emotions and desires to which the form was deemed capable of giving voice.

Given that questions of genre and gender and their relationship to language have shaped the critical discourse on tz'u for centuries, it seems only appropriate that the text that most of the essays included here begin with or return to is Li Ch'ing-chao's "Critique of the Song Lyric" ("Tz'u lun"), written early in the twelfth century. In the first chapter of this volume, "The Formation of a Distinct Generic Identity for Tz'u ," Shuen-fu Lin opens by pointing out that this brief essay by perhaps the best-known woman song lyricist in Chinese literary history establishes the central critical statement for the genre, that it "constitutes its own household [distinct from shih ]." Isolating the characteristics of that "household" occupied critical attention for centuries. Lin's essay is one of three that have been grouped together here in a section entitled "Defining the Song Lyric Voice: Questions of Genre"; in it he explores the formation of the genre's identity in its historical and literary contexts. Following Li Ch'ing-chao's lead, Lin examines the crucial relationship between poetry and music in general, focusing specifically on the development of what he calls the "intrinsic music" of tz'u —uneven line-lengths, strophic divisions, complex rhyme schemes, alternation of level and oblique tones, and intricate tonal patterns differing from those of regulated verse—that evolved in conjunction with the "extrinsic music" of banquet songs and continued to govern the aesthetics of song lyrics long after the tunes had been lost. The three most important developments in tz'u aesthetics, he argues, are the awareness that the genre could speak of private feelings not appropriately subsumed under the rubric of chih —that is, what is "intently on the mind"—which was traditionally assumed to carry moral and/or political import and whose public articulation was properly the responsibility

of shih ; the distinction between the two schools of "heroic abandon" (hao-fang ) and "delicate restraint" (wan-yüeh ) that expanded the thematic range of the form; and the evolution of a longer form, man-tz'u , that allowed for even greater emotional nuance and expressive potential. Lin discusses Li Ch'ing-chao's critical comments on her fellow song lyricists in the context of these developments and concludes by speculating on possible reasons behind the often-noted and curious omission of Chou Pang-yen from her essay: these are related, he suggests, to the fact that Chou's attention to the musical nature of the form restored what Li considered to be an essential aspect of its original identity and therefore exempted him from Li's otherwise unstinting critique of her contemporaries.

If general agreement developed that tz'u could express private sentiment more flexibly and "genuinely" than shih , what was not so clear was how "true" those private sentiments in fact were. In the second chapter in this section, "Meaning the Words: The Genuine as a Value in the Tradition of the Song Lyric," Stephen Owen argues that the origins of the song lyric in conventions of performance created a problem for literati songwriters seeking a vehicle for unmediated expression; this problem was thematized, moreover, in their very poems. In a series of close readings Owen traces the transformation of the genre from one governed by normative and typological conventions to one capable of being read, like shih , as the cry of a particular occasion. His discussion of Li Ch'ing-chao's famous lyric to the tune "Sheng-sheng man" provides a central example of this preoccupation with the (in) commensurability of poetic language to feeling, a problem that is made explicit and resolved in the poem itself. His concluding reading of Li Yü's famous lyric to the tune "Yü mei-jen" demonstrates how the arrangement (taxis ) of words in tz'u , and in particular the framing or "quotation" of diction typical of shih by language from the vernacular, self-reflectively comments on the received images of the tradition and not only reanimates them, but also thereby makes that conventional language—and the lyric as the whole—resonate with an apparent truth of genuine emotion. He thereby illuminates one crucial way in which the genres of shih and tz'u are both related to and distinguished from each other.

From the perspective of the song lyric, this distinction could not but be invidious, harboring within itself a protracted discursive privileging of the earlier genre. My essay on "Song Lyrics and the Canon: A Look at Anthologies of Tz'u " examines the development of a response to this problem by tracing the ongoing effort to legitimize the song lyric as it took shape in the compilation of anthologies from the mid-tenth century

onward. Repeated evidence of careless editing, significant lacunae in the record, and a general lack of textual integrity in the collections, as well as the polemics of marginality that color critical prefaces and commentaries attest to the questionable status of the song lyric for centuries. At the same time, however, the totalizing impulses of Chinese literary history could always recuperate the tz'u by locating it within a direct genealogical line of transmission from canonical poetic ancestors. In the endlessly resumed discussion about the status and definition of the genre that takes place in anthologies, I argue, there is a constant vacillation between the urge to locate tz'u squarely within a tradition shared with and dominated by shih and the wish to establish a separate space for it with its own internal demarcations.

These issues and positions—of accommodation, resistance, and appropriation—are analogous in significant ways to those that confronted women writers of tz'u in search of an authentic female voice and language, illustrating the significant interweaving of gender and genre theory in the history of the song lyric. The assumption that the song lyric was distinctively "feminine" in subject matter, style, language, or authorship shaped the discourse on its identity as a genre, and all of the essays in the second section in this volume, "Man's Voice/Woman's Voice: Questions of Gender," approach these issues in different ways. The first of the three, Grace S. Fong's "Engendering the Lyric: Her Image and Voice in Song," focuses on the feminine as consistently central in the aesthetics and poetics of the tz'u and yet paradoxically marginal, in that such constructions were largely fashioned by male poets and critics. She outlines the development of an increasingly male-dominated, "universal" poetic of the shih and the feminine coding of both tz'u as a genre and of the privileged style of "delicate restraint" within it. Such coding opened up possibilities for emotional expression foreclosed by the earlier poetic form that seemed particularly "natural" for women; at the same time, however, it undermined the legitimacy of the genre—whether employed by men or women—and also ran the risk of compromising the moral stature of real women who assumed female erotic personas. Fong traces the history of a number of searches for an authentic female voice and language among writers of song lyrics, concluding with the work of Ch'iu Chin, who rejected the image and poetics of the feminine constructed by the dominant tradition and appropriated a style previously coded as masculine as her own, with it to create the voice of a woman discontent with the shackles of both literary and social convention.

In his essay "The Poetry of Li Ch'ing-chao: A Woman Author and

Women's Authorship," John Timothy Wixted approaches this issue of a female literary tradition in China through a focus on critical views of one early and unquestionably prominent figure. Although there is no evidence that Li identified with earlier or contemporary women writers or that she served as a conscious female role model for later women poets, she was certainly linked retrospectively to women poets before her and became the standard by which women after her were measured. Wixted notes that negative critical opinions of Li Ch'ing-chao's song lyrics were usually linked to her being a woman and were paradoxically motivated by autobiographical readings of them as if they were, in fact, shih (the compromising situation discussed by Fong as well). By contrast, of course, any praise accorded her was not related to a specifically female identity or language, and Wixted concludes that Li does not occupy a position within the separate female literary tradition examined by Fong; her status, rather, derives from being considered a "[female] male among males," an honorary member of the poetic fraternity.

To the extent that any literary sorority did develop, it took root in the late Ming and flourished into the Ch'ing, and particularly among the circles studied by Kang-i Sun Chang in her chapter, "Liu Shih and Hsü Ts'an: Feminine or Feminist?" Chang focuses on two women of markedly different social and educational backgrounds but remarkably equal poetic accomplishment who provided new models for women writers. As a courtesan, Liu Shih moved freely in heavily male and literarily exalted circles; she was instrumental to Ch'en Tzu-lung's literary innovations but herself wrote primarily in the femininely coded style of "delicate restraint." Hsü Ts'an, by contrast, a gentry woman supplanted in her own marriage by a concubine, transcended social restrictions on what and how women of her station could write, and employed political language and loyalist themes in song lyrics written in the masculinely coded style of "heroic abandon." Although social boundaries between courtesans and gentry women could of course be crossed through, for example, marriage, Chang argues that two distinctive poetic styles identifiable with the two groups did exist and that the relative timidity on the part of courtesans in terms of style and theme resulted logically, by the eighteenth century, in their displacement from the center of the literary scene by gentry women. Although poetry written by courtesans remained influential as a secret model for literati women, it came to be virtually eliminated from the literary record; gentry women, by contrast, gained the access to circulation—for both themselves and their writings—that had once been the privilege of the courtesans.

The third group of papers in this volume, "From Voice to Text:

Questions of Genealogy," focuses on a variety of issues having to do with the history of the preservation, circulation, and critical reception of tz'u . Ronald C. Egan discusses the questionable status of the genre, already alluded to in earlier chapters, in his essay, "The Problem of the Repute of Tz'u During the Northern Sung." Beneath the traditional pairing of "T'ang shih and Sung tz'u " that would seem to imply that each form enjoyed a stature commensurate with the other in its own time, Egan uncovers an early disesteem and struggle for acceptance on the part of the tz'u during the Northern Sung that belies accepted literary-historical homilies and has also significantly affected the evolution of the form itself. Not only the remarkable silence on the part of major figures of the period regarding their composition of song lyrics, but their outright denunciations of the genre as well, provide evidence of a profoundly ambivalent attitude that was only partially resolved, in the case of Su Shih, by the development of stylistic and thematic innovations. Egan argues that various efforts to establish a respectable genealogy for the genre were ultimately unconvincing and that what legitimacy was eventually accorded it was linked most probably to the elevation in stature of all cultural pursuits at the end of the Northern Sung rather than to any particular revaluation of tz'u itself.

In his essay "Contexts of the Song Lyric in Sung Times: Communication Technology, Social Change, Morality," Stuart H. Sargent discusses developments, particularly within the material culture of the Southern Sung, that may have represented a partial response to the genre's problematic status. Sargent explores the apparent contradiction between the song lyric's ties to oral performance and its undeniably well-developed chirographic existence. Along with another curious development—the genre's claim to trace a morphology of feeling despite its evident appeal to large segments of society that clearly mistrusted such feeling—this paradox suggests an awareness of both the dangers of the form (and its consequent disrepute) and the possibility and importance, nonetheless, of becoming detached from one's utterance. Sargent argues that such detachment is characteristic of a literate culture and is perhaps intensified through the proliferation of printed manuscripts, and he discusses at great length the written record preserving tz'u during the Southern Sung, focusing on Chiang-nan West Circuit. Indeed, he proposes that the rise and spread of printed texts in China coincided precisely with the development of the song lyric, possibly encouraging, among other things, the growing tendency toward increasingly "difficult" tz'u during this period; it may also have defused the moral dan-

gers of the form's emotional power, as it moved from the immediacy of performance to the remoteness of print.

Testimony to the eventual critical acceptance of the genre is provided by Yeh Chia-ying's essay on the sophisticated theory and practice of the late Ch'ing critic Wang Kuo-wei. In her essay "Wang Kuo-wei's Song Lyrics in the Light of His Own Theories," she offers a new understanding of Wang's pronouncements on what makes the song lyric distinctive by examining a selection of his own lyrics through the prism of his concept of ching-chieh (the poetic "setting" or "scene"). In its sense specific to the song lyric, Yeh argues, the term ching-chieh refers to the latent suggestive power of imagery to evoke associations beyond the ostensible topic of the poem, feelings not necessarily intended by the poet, and references that are symbolic as well as circumstantial. These possibilities can be developed within what she delineates as the three major categories of tz'u : those actually written as words to music; those no longer written to be sung but composed, rather, like shih , for the purpose of self-expression; and those approaching the elaborate expository and architectonic structures of the rhapsody ( fu ). Her close readings of four exemplary song lyrics explore the textual, contextual, and intertextual resonances of each image to illustrate the infusion of external scene with complex emotional tone and argue against previously one-sided interpretations of the works. Like Owen, Yeh suggests, through her concluding discussion of a song lyric writing of a love affair that may be real or invented, that one distinctive feature of the genre is its very self-reflectiveness.

Finally, Daniel Bryant traces the textual history of two specific collections of tz'u and brings his findings to bear on establishing with care the most likely version of the same song lyric discussed by Stephen Owen in his chapter, a lyric by Li Yü to the tune "Yü mei-jen." Bryant's "Messages of Uncertain Origin: The Textual Tradition of the Nan-T'ang erhchu tz'u " employs computer-assisted methodology to produce a genealogy of the extant editions of this collection of song lyrics by Li Yü and his father, Li Ching. In the process, his work also affirms the authenticity of an important Sung dynasty anthology, the Tsun-ch'ien chi , details of whose compilation had previously been subject to considerable critical dispute, and provides the basis for a variorum edition of the collected works of the two rulers of the Southern T'ang. Bryant's painstaking detective work establishing likely archetypes, derivations, and filiations of variant readings relies in the end—somewhat to the relief of other less technologically literate conference participants—on the ability of the

human brain ( jen-nao ) to make judgments between options presented by the computer (tien-nao ). But he clearly demonstrates the importance, for any sound literary scholarship, of knowing what text one is actually working with, what questions about it can or cannot be answered, and why.

In addition to the authors who are represented in this volume, five participants at the 1990 Breckinridge conference presented papers that, regretfully, could not be included here. We are extremely grateful to Mr. Chen Bang-yan of the Shanghai Classics Publishing House, Professor Kao Yu-kung of Princeton University, Dr. Shi Yi-dui of the Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Professor Yang Hai-ming of Suzhou University, and Dr. Yang Hsien-ch'ing (Yang Tse) of the China Daily News for their lively and insightful contributions to the discussions at all of the sessions. In particular, their chanting of song lyrics in various styles at the final session—in which other scholars also participated—provided a pleasant and salutary reminder, amid the temptations of abstract and text-oriented theorization, of the sensuous core of our subject matter. Professors David Knechtges of the University of Washington and Anthony C. Yu of the University of Chicago offered wide-ranging and valuable comments on both individual papers and the discussion as a whole, from which we all learned a great deal.

Both before and after the conference itself, many other individuals provided invaluable assistance in a number of ways. I would like to thank Stephen Owen, who was co-organizer of the conference, for his instrumental role in conceiving of and developing the plans for the meeting, which, to the deep regret of us all, he was unable to attend; his presence was sorely missed, but his thoughts and statements about the subject were in evidence throughout the proceedings and have been reflected in this introductory essay as well. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable advice and support of the other members of the planning committee, Kang-i Sun Chang, Grace Fong, Shuen-fu Lin, and Tim Wixted, who cheerfully endured a weekend of brutal heat in the summer of 1988 to draft a framework for the meeting. Edward Peng, a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, provided crucial last-minute assistance in the preparation of the manuscript for publication, for which I am very grateful. Thanks are also due to Victor Tam and the other obliging staff members of the Humanities Computing Facility at U.C. Irvine, who resolved the countless hardware and software problems created by my attempts to coordinate and make sense of the Babel of languages and formats in which these essays arrived on my desk. The contributors to this volume

benefited from the many helpful comments and suggestions offered by the two reviewers of the manuscript, although we resolutely retained the diversity of our individual voices. In addition, we are very grateful to Deborah Rudolph at the University of California Press for her extra-ordinarily meticulous and sensitive copyediting, and to editors Sheila Levine and Betsey Scheiner for their enthusiastic support of the volume. Finally, all of the participants at the conference owe a profound debt of gratitude to the three rapporteurs—Pauline Lin, Kathy Lowry, and Sophie Volpp—whose unstinting efforts before, during, and after the conference made possible a transmission of the record that any chronicler of the song lyric could not but contemplate with a sigh of deepest envy.

PAULINE YU