Shaping of the Book of Songs

<p>The present work is a study on the formation of the <i>Shih-ching</i>. The author poses the hypothesis that this collection of poems as the standard music and literature passed down to later generations initially incorporated different cultural heritages through a process which moved from ritualization to secularization as well as standardization to localization. </p><p>In aiming to find the origins of the division of the <i>Shih-ching</i> into sections and subsections and their titles as Nan Feng Ya and Sung the author employs an interdisciplinary methodology combining ethno-musicological methods with paleography philology and archaeology. He draws on new archaeological data of the past two decades that has shed new light on the <i>Shih-ching</i>.</p>