Between refinement and vulgarity: Apparent contradictions in Ouyang Xiu’s song lyrics

Authors

  • Massimiliano Canale University of Naples "L'Orientale"

Abstract

Revered as one of the greatest Confucian scholars of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072) also went down in history for his reputation as a libertine and his involvement in a series of sexual scandals. A persistent contradiction between the public orthodoxy of the great statesman and the heterodoxy of his private experiences has marked Ouyang’s life and was reflected in his work. This paper aims to investigate the traces of such tensions in the song lyrics (ci 詞) attributed to the author. In fact, his songbook includes compositions that fully embody the ideal of “refinement” (ya 雅) generally appreciated by the elite alongside others that show a clear affinity with a diction and style typical of the vulgar (su 俗) tradition. If criticism has often been divided in the evaluation of these heterogeneous components, sometimes viewing them as expressions of separate corpora, I intend to explore the possibility of an organic reading of the two. Therefore, I seek to present the disparate lyrics attributed to Ouyang as potentially ascribable to a single, multifaceted literary sensibility.

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Author Biography

Massimiliano Canale, University of Naples "L'Orientale"

Massimiliano Canale is an Adjunct Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” where he has also been teaching Chinese Philology (Classical Chinese) and Chinese Language (Mandarin Chinese). He received his PhD from the same university in 2021, carrying out research on the song lyric (ci 詞) of the mid-Northern Song period. During his PhD, he has tried to characterize the song lyric as a means to respond to a variety of inner and social conflicts felt by scholar-officials of that time. In particular, he has been investigating tensions between desire and reality in the work of some representative authors of that tradition. He was subsequently awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange to explore the relationships between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in a selection of eleventh-century songbooks.

Massimiliano can be contacted at: mcanale@unior.it

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Published

2025-02-20

Issue

Vol. 28 No. 2 (2024): Special Issue on Chinese Studies

Section

Literature in Imperial China

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