Shuntian You

Name: Shuntian You
ISBN: 9787559846655

李季Guangxi Normal University Press · ChinaOct 2022

4.0

Word count: 84K words
Chapters: 15
ISBN: 9787559846655

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Summary

"Shuntian You" is one of the principal forms of folk song in northern Shaanxi, the Jin-Sui region, and Inner Mongolia, and a form of poetry with the simplest structure. Because its form is free and vivid, suited to expressing and passing on the life and emotions of the people, the peasants living here are not only its singers and transmitters but also its creators, composing new "Shuntian You" out of their own feelings and life experiences. The celebrated poet Li Ji had the good fortune to work and live in the Three Border region of northern Shaanxi, one of the homelands of "Shuntian You." In his spare time he collected several thousand pieces of "literature and art in the bud"—"Shuntian You"—from peasant singers, old shepherd men, village women, and district and township cadres, and selected and arranged them. As raw material and research data for literary and art workers, this folk-song art is of great significance for promoting folk culture.

Editor's review

Shuntian You is the fruit of the poet Li Ji's fieldwork in folk literature in the "Three Border" region of northern Shaanxi (Dingbian, Jingbian, and Anbian), and the first work to systematically compile and study northern Shaanxi's Xintianyou. Published in 1950 and reissued more than seventy years later by Guangxi Normal University Press, its value lies not only in literature but in its precious records for anthropology and folklore studies. Li Ji was no mere recorder: upholding the principle of "learning from the folk, going deep among the folk," he brought Xintianyou—a folk-song form passed down orally—from fields and villages into the halls of literature. The several hundred Xintianyou collected here cover a vast range of subjects, from passionate love between men and women to the heavy suffering of class oppression, from daily labor to the broad customs of the loess plateau, vividly and comprehensively revealing the spiritual world and survival landscape of the people of northern Shaanxi in the first half of the twentieth century. Li Ji's annotation and classification gave these scattered folk treasures a systematic framework, allowing us to touch a highly vital form of "oral epic." For contemporary readers, reading Shuntian You is a journey of sound across time and space, in which we can feel the warmth of the land, the simplicity of life, and the surging emotional power that blooms amid extreme barrenness. This is not merely a collection of folk songs but a precious archive of the Chinese nation's oral tradition and folk wisdom.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Researchers or enthusiasts with a strong interest in northern Shaanxi folk culture and Xintianyou folk songs.
Readers who wish to understand the history of collecting, compiling, and reworking folk literature in twentieth-century China.
Writers engaged in poetry or literary research who hope to draw inspiration from folk oral traditions.
Readers interested in the history of ordinary people's daily life and social emotions.

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting a tightly structured fictional narrative with a coherent plot.
Readers seeking light entertainment or purely aesthetic appreciation, with little patience for historical and cultural background.

Reading tips

Before reading the main text, read carefully the book's preface, editorial notes, and Li Ji's own related discussions to understand his fieldwork background, editorial principles, and scholarly approach.
Read the book alongside Li Ji's later long poem Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang, deeply influenced by Xintianyou, and observe how folk resources were transformed into individual creation.
Do not rush; as you read the lyrics, try to imagine their melodies and performance settings, or even pair the reading with existing audio recordings of Xintianyou for an immersive 'audio-visual' experience.

About the publisher

Guangxi Normal University Press China · Founded in 1986

Guangxi Normal University Press is a publisher known for literature, foreign literature and history titles. Its 1,175 books in the database show a solid accumulation in classics and prose collections, including foreign literary works such as Les Fleurs du mal: Annotated Poems of Baudelaire, Snow Country, Dubliners and The Wild Palms, as well as modern prose compilations like The Complete Prose of Zhou Zuoren. History and philosophy also hold a notable share, with titles such as Running Dogs: Clerks and Runners in Qing County Yamen and The History and Thought of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom reflecting attention to Qing local administration and modern history. In art literature there is the 16-volume Ten Bamboo Studio Painting and Calligraphy Manual. Its author resources include foreign writers Charles Baudelaire and Yasunari Kawabata, translators and annotators Liu Nanqi and Zou Bo, and scholars such as Zhong Shuhe, Bradly W. Reed and You Chenjun. As public information is limited, this characterization is based only on the books in the database, which together present a profile balancing Chinese and foreign literary classics with academic works in the humanities and social sciences.

版权信息
辑者小序
引言好地方还数咱老三边
第一辑千年的顺天游黄土地里埋
第二辑你把你的白脸脸调过来
第三辑树叶叶落在树根底
第四辑千里的雷声万里的闪
第五辑向几位乡间民歌手学的民歌
婆婆不叫看我的娘
打镇靖城
四季生产歌
反对信巫神歌
父子揽工（节选）
附录顺天游曲谱选
后记

FAQ

What is the relationship between Shuntian You and Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang, which Li Ji wrote later?

Shuntian You is Li Ji's compilation and study of folk Xintianyou after fieldwork in northern Shaanxi, belonging to the collecting and organizing of folk literature. Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang is a long narrative poem Li Ji created using the artistic form of Xintianyou (two lines per stanza, the bi-xing device, and so on), an artistic recreation after a literary writer learned from the folk. The former is the 'source' and 'material,' the latter the 'stream' and 'work'; together they embody Li Ji's creative path of 'coming from the folk and going into creation.'

Is this book difficult for readers unfamiliar with northern Shaanxi culture?

The editor's notes on some dialect words and specific historical customs lower the difficulty of understanding the text directly. Its real 'threshold' may lie not in literal meaning but in how to enter that particular regional cultural emotion and mode of expression. As long as one reads with an open mind to feel the sincere, passionate, and plain emotional core, even without familiarity with the specific background, one can be moved by its powerful vitality. Cultural unfamiliarity is itself a valuable reading experience.

What new value or features does this reissue have compared with the first edition?

The reissue by Guangxi Normal University Press is, first of all, better suited in binding and presentation to contemporary reading habits. More importantly, reexamining this work after more than seventy years allows us to place it in a longer historical span and a broader scholarly perspective (such as intangible cultural heritage protection and oral poetics theory) and to recognize its value as ethnography and sound archive beyond the literary text. The reissue itself also signifies the academic and cultural spheres' renewed affirmation and transmission of this folk heritage.

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About the author

李季 Author

Li Ji is an author of fairly diverse output, about whom limited public information is available; no clear record exists of birth and death dates, native place, or educational background. The library holds six of the author's works, spanning modern poetry, social science, examinations, programming design, and finance, which indicates a cross-disciplinary range of writing interests. Among the representative works, Shun Tian You and Beloved Qaidam are presented in poetic form, the former continuing the tradition of northern Shaanxi folk songs and the latter expressing feeling for the landscapes of the northwestern highlands, both in plain language with a strong local flavor. The book on activity-based class meetings for moral education, part of the School Brand Library, focuses on the practical design of school moral education activities. Introduction to University Information Literacy and its laboratory tutorial serve university teaching in information literacy, combining theory with hands-on practice, while Metaverse Practice addresses programming design and applications of emerging technology. Overall, the author's writing moves between literary expression and practical teaching, with considerable breadth of subject matter; readers may consult individual titles for further understanding.