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).
By presenting poems in so many different forms: Chinese characters, Romanization, English translation, audio files, stress maps, and transliteration, the book enables the reader -- no matter what her background in Chinese language, to grasp much of what is going on. BLT Not Just a Sandwich 9/5/2011