The approach of this study is essentially a form of structural, or perhaps “constructural,” semiotics; it examines what holds the literary text together in the face of its propensity to unravel. Specifically, it looks at a nearly invisible Chinese literary form in a comparative perspective by bringing one type of artifactuality (academic inquiry in English) to bear on a very different sort (Chinese lyricism), thereby illuminating the dynamics of the latter in the cross-light of the former. This is in no way a dismissal of indigenous, culturally intimate ways of knowing the works, nor is it a denial of the cross-current of contradiction and divergence that is always working against the form, always preventing a final interpretation. The aim of this study is to find a middle ground where this methodological cross-light will show the aesthetic whole, along with its inherent disruptions, as a construction that fits patterns of meaning that are culturally and historically bound, even if unstated: the Chinese lyric sequence.
This is an important book for scholars studying Chinese literature, comparative literature, world literature, and poetry-painting.