How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology

Edited by Zong-qi Cai

Paper, 456 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13941-0
$32.50 / £22.50

January, 2008
Cloth, 456 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13940-3
$74.50 / £51.50

"This valuable guidebook offers multiple routes toward understanding the vast and varied traditions and practices of classical Chinese poetry, from its beginnings through the Qing dynasty. Close readings of individual poems-including the 'chestnuts' we all love to teach-are grounded in useful discussions of literary-historical and cultural contexts. A cross-cutting discussion of themes suggests ways in which the poems can speak to each other across boundaries of genre and dynasty. And the unusually extensive attention paid to the sound and prosody of Chinese poetry will be especially welcome to student and scholar alike." — Pauline Yu , president of the American Council of Learned Societies

Related Subjects

• Asian Literature
• Drama
• East Asian Studies
• Poetry

About the Author

Zong-qi Cai is professor of Chinese and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Matrix of Lyric Transformation: Poetic Modes and Self-Presentation in Early Chinese Pentasyllabic Poetry (Michigan, 1996) and Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Hawai'i, 2002), and is the editor of A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin dialong (Stanford, 2001) and Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties (Hawai'i, 2004).

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