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).