Abstract: The Great Preface of the Mao School of Poetry is a foundational document for the exegesis of the Shijing and a landmark for Chinese literary theory. Despite its status as the first cornerstone for Chinese poetics, it has incurred harsh criticism due to its various inadequacies and unknown origin, and is never regarded as the first self-consciously composed literary criticism. Is The Great Preface indeed a discourse with a loose structure and inconsistent thesis as the critics have suggested? To re-examine its writing, conception, and overall structure from the perspective of post-structuralist discourse theory will draw an opposite conclusion: The Great Preface has a clear thesis, subtly conceived, and coherently argued, with a distinctive organization and reasoning predicated on the basis of ostensibly obsolete philology. Moreover, its structure and ways of signification and representation implicitly contain a creative model of writing that anticipates Julia Kristeva's intertextuality and Jacques Derrida's dissemination, thereby enabling the treatise to be viewed as a post-structuralist poetic discourse. Adopting an approach that integrates traditional philology with post-structuralism, this article investigates these concerns: (1) Does traditional poetics based on philology radically differ from post-structuralist poetics? (2) Why is The Great Preface not fairly evaluated in history? (3) What sort of poetics does the The Great Preface imply in comparison with Western and modern poetics? (4) What insights can a new reading of The Great Preface in terms of modern poetics shed on the modernization of traditional Chinese literary theory?

Key words: The Great Preface, poetics, intertextuality, dissemination, post-structuralism, modernization of ancient poetics