The Study Of Stephen Owen’s Research Of Song Lyrics ——Taking "Just A Song" As An Example

The American sinologist Stephen Owen’s research in the field of Tang poetry is well known to all,while his study on Song lyrics is relatively rare.However,the research on the latter reflects some of his new academic ideas in recent years,which is of great value.This paper takes his new book,Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the11 th to the 12 th Century,as its research object,comparing the ideas with related research results from home and abroad in order to further understand the strengths and weaknesses of Stephen Owen’s Song lyric study.This thesis includes four parts.The introduction part gives an overview of the overall research statue of lyric studies in North America,sorting out the main contents of Stephen Owen’s separate theses,and generally introducing the research contents of Just a Song and the relevant studies of Stephen Owen’s new work.The author chooses two representative points from Stephen Owen’s Just a Song and discusses them separately in Chapters 1 and 2——Stephen Owen’s study of the evolution of the Song lyrics’ style and Stephen Owen’s study of the expression of the“self-consciousness” in lyrics.Chapter 3 is aimed at explaining the characteristics of Stephen Owen’s study of Song lyrics.In the first chapter,the author first provides an overview of North American sinologists’ research on this issue,and then discusses Stephen Owen’s views on the evolution of lyric style in terms of “gender and style” and “the fluidity of literary works”.The second chapter discusses the “self-consciousness” reflected in Stephen Owen’s research on Song lyrics,which has been discussed in his research of Mid-Tang literature.This part including three perspectives: the creation of an“separate space” for the lyricist,the way of lyricist’s self-expression（“autobiographical composition and reading”）and the resulting misinterpreting of lyricists’ image.In the third chapter,the author elaborates on the characteristics of Stephen Owen’s Song lyrics research from two perspectives: his view of research and research methods.