Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China

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, structural...