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Part Two: Focalization in Cen Shen's Frontier Landscapes
Introductory Remarks
Part one of this thesis was somewhat general in its approach. Beginning with a historical
background to frontier poetry in chapter one that was immediately followed by the introduction of
frontier poetry's core themes in chapter two, and then ending with a discussion of the burgeoning of the
subgenre in chapter three, the thesis thus far has yet to refine its attention and engage in an extended
analysis of one feature of frontier poetry. But such paucity of particulars is about to be remedied here in
part two.
The second half of this thesis continues with frontier poetry as its subject; however, rather than
discussing several writers and numerous works of differing thematic scope, the following chapters will
be concerned primarily with one poet, Cen Shen, and how the poet-narrators in his frontier poems
focalize borderland settings characterized by heat, cold and distance. The objective of such an
investigation is to demonstrate how Cen Shen's poet-narrators display certain selfsame patterns in
focalizing each type of frontier environment. These manners of focalization are not limited to single
texts but are instead repeated intertextually, and in their iterations form a habit in how the hot, cold and
distant frontier landscapes are perceived by the poet-narrators.
Chapter four begins with an overview of a common paradigm for discussing Cen Shen's frontier
poetry, in particular his frontier landscape, where the poems' “strangeness” predominates critical
attention and responses. The second half of the chapter introduces, defines and exemplifies the
theoretical terminology behind the focalization framework that is applied in chapters five and six to
evince the underlying patterns of perception in the three types of frontier landscapes.
Chapter five addresses focalization in two of Cen Shen's frontier settings – the thermal (hot) and