A Flavor All Its Own: Some Theoretical Considerations on Sanqu Songs as Mixed-Register Literature

This article proposes a new typology of the sanqu corpus. The discussion analyzes a cross section of sanqu songs in terms of how they engaged with language registers, on the one hand, and how they recontextualized existing motifs and media, on the other. Specifically, the article focuses on three subsets of songs: songs that foreground everyday vignettes, songs that celebrate festive occasions at court, and songs that revisit the exemplars of Chinese literature, history, and religion. The article suggests that everyday songs and court-oriented songs prized the aesthetic of immediacy, while certain mixed-register songs more explicitly exhibited differently oriented signs of hypermediacy.