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analyses fail to satisfy a reader's curiosity to understand the anatomy of Cen Shen's frontier landscapes,
namely the underlying images structuring the dominant landscape themes and the poet-narrator's
manner of perceiving these imagistic features as they cooperate to form the long regarded unique world
of Cen Shen's frontier poems. Rather than relying on the sticky subjectivity of “strange” and “peculiar”
as an exegetical impetus, the remainder of this thesis will apply a more rigorous set of terms under the
umbrella of “focalization” to explore in detail the imagery constituting Cen Shen's thermal, hibernal
and distant frontier landscapes 59 and the means by which this imagery is perceived, or “focalized”, by
the poet-narrator and how his psychological orientation has occasion to reveal itself and affect the
presentation of a landscape's existents. The analysis will evince patterns in the imagistic structure of the
frontier landscape and habits the poet-narrator follows while he perceives, or “focalizes”, three major
frontier settings. But before embarking on this examination, the theoretical tools vital to such an
explication need to be defined and exemplified.
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4.2. A Model of Focalization: Key Instruments For Investigating the Frontier Landscape
In order to facilitate an understanding of what comprises Cen Shen's hibernal, thermal and
distant frontier landscapes and how these components are presented by the poet-narrator, one method is
to direct attention to an awareness of processes involved in the poems' focalization. 60 In its broadest
sense, focalization refers to the relationship between the elements in a story, or for purposes of this
thesis the existents of the poems' settings, and the perceptual or psychological manner in which they are
perceived and presented to the reader. 61 The manner of presentation is determined by the focalizer, the
59 Frontier landscapes characterized by heat (thermal), cold (hibernal) and vast spaces (distant). These three landscapes
comprise the three main landscape themes of Cen Shen's frontier poetry. The remainder of this thesis seeks to uncover
the composition and pervading structure of these three themes.
60 This subsection of chapter four is intended as an introduction to theoretical terms which will be employed to reach
conclusions on how Cen Shen's frontier landscapes are perceived and what comprises their poetic being.
61 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative 3 rd . ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), p.