Book Review: Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries by Stephen Owen. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019.

Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries, by Stephen Owen. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. 430. $ 49.95 (hardcover).

Stephen Owen writes unlike any other scholar of literature I can think of. Most scholarly books adhere to a tripartite form: introduction, four or five or six chapters of case studies, conclusion. Owen's books are discursive walks through texts and contexts or else theoretical considerations full of "digressions," "countervoices" and "counterstatements," and "forking paths." They don't argue as much as they state. He is confident and authoritative not only on his subject but on whatever he cares to mention, yet he wears his erudition lightly. Most books are engagements with lineages of other scholarship and contentions over minutiae, which makes them foreboding to beginners and off-limits to the "general reader." Owen's book on the high Tang, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry (1981), has only 110 endnotes for over 300 pages (large pages) of text. In coursework at graduate school, I remember someone describing him as that rare scholar that both specialists and novices could learn from.

Just a Song, Owen's history of song lyric (ci M) in the Northern Song dynasty (9601127), presents a conundrum. I have never been convinced that the Chinese poem was "a unique, factual account of an experience in historical time, a human consciousness encountering, interpreting, and responding to the world," as he claims in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, while in the Western poem "all is metaphor and fiction."1 But this fiction has allowed Owen to write literary histories that interweave the literary and the historical into engaging texts. His histories of Tang poetry are books that historians of medieval China also read. In contrast, Just a Song begins with a question about how we can reconcile the Song dynasty, which was "intellectually very 'serious' and rationalizing (if not entirely rational)," with song lyric, for which "the coherent whole is irrelevant and nothing matters more than lost love, the pleasure and mood of the moment" (1). In other words, the salient fact of song lyric, for Owen, is that it didn't matter much to northern Song history. How to construct a history from that premise?

Owen's answer is to narrate the ci's progression...