This comprehensive comparative study of Western and Chinese poetics begins with broad examinations of the two traditions over more than two and a half millennia. From these parallel surveys, a series of important theoretical questions arises: How do Western and Chinese critics conceptualize the nature, origin, and function of literature? What are the fundamental differences, if any, in their ways of thinking about literature? Can we account for these differences by examining Western truth-based and Chinese process-based cosmological paradigms? What are the major distinctive concepts of...