How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology

H o w t o R e a d CHi n e s e P o e tRy

A Gu i d e d A n t h o l o g y

Z o n g - q i C a i

editor

C o l u m b i a un i v eRs i t y PRe s s * new yoRk

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup

editorC a i

c o l u m b i a

“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 ‘chest-

nuts’ 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,presidentoftheAmericanCouncilofLearnedSocieties

in this “guided” anthology, experts lead students through the major genres and eras

of chinese poetry from antiquity to the modern time. The volume is divided into 6

chronological sections and features more than 140 examples of the best shi, sao, fu, ci,

and qu poems. a comprehensive introduction and extensive thematic table of con-

tents highlight the thematic, formal, and prosodic features of chinese poetry, and

each chapter is written by a scholar who specializes in a particular period or genre.

Poems are presented in chinese and English and are accompanied by a tone-marked

romanized version, an explanation of chinese linguistic and poetic conventions, and

recommended reading strategies. Sound recordings of the poems are available online

free of charge. These unique features facilitate an intense engagement with chinese

poetic texts and help the reader derive the aesthetic pleasure and insight from these

works as one could from the original.

Z o n g - q i C a i 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 Lit-

erary 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).

Printed in the

u.S.

Coverdesign:MartinHinze a.

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