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emanating from Cen Shen's thermal frontier is still marked by an unusual and intimidating character
rarely visited by Tang poets 12 . Chapter four of this thesis briefly outlined the critical habit of reading
these hinterlands through a prism of the strange and wonderful (qi 奇 ). And while this section of
chapter five will also visit Cen Shen's topographically peculiar, it will not be with the goal of mining
rare moods and precious sights. Instead, the motivation is to investigate the perceptual facet of the poetnarrators
in Cen Shen's “hot” landscape poems, and show how despite belonging to different poems the
poet-narrators nonetheless still focalize the landscape in similar fashions. This pattern of focalization is
not merely a case of images – the focalized objects – being repeated throughout the texts. Rather, this
chapter contends that certain aspects of how the poet-narrators focalize the landscape in Cen Shen's
thermal frontier landscape poems, 13 the manner in which they “see” the landscape, is repeated across
the poems and thus links them intertextually. 14
One of these aspects of focalization is the similarity among the poems in the presentation of the
thermal theme and its initial sub-thematic development; a farther reaching characteristic is the
similarity of lenses used by the poet-narrators both in ordinary and imaginary modes of focalization to
focalize sub-themes of the landscape's heat, a burning maelstrom which is also apprehended as
wreacking great meteorological havoc against the broader world 15 of the poems.
12 Ronald Miao, “T'ang Frontier Poetry”, p. 128 and Marie Chan, “The Frontier Poems of Ts'en Shen”, p. 428. Having the
greatest knowledge of Central Asian geography among Chinese poets, Cen Shen's most conspicuous contributions to the
frontier poetry, the subgenre for which he is best remembered, are on topics such as the heat and volcanic lakes of the far
northwestern region, topics previously unknown in Chinese poetry. See Marie Chan's entry in William H. Nienhauser,
The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, p. 798.
13 These poems, where Cen Shen's “hot” landscapes feature prominently, are “Passing Fire Mountain” 经 火 山 ; “ Parting:
Song of Fire Mountain Clouds” 火 山 云 歌 送 别 ; “Song of Hot Lake: Sending Off Censor Cui on his Return to the
Capital” 热 海 行 送 催 侍 御 还 京 ; and to a lesser extent the opening of “Mission to Jiaohe Commandery” (“Shi
Jiaohequn” 使 交 河 群 ). See the first appendix of this thesis for their full translations.
14 An intertextual reading means reading “literary works not [as]...autonomous entities, 'organic wholes', but [as]
intertextual constructs: sequences which have meaning in relations to other texts...”. See Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of
Signs: Semiotics, Literature and Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 38. The “meaning” of
greatest interest here is the method itself by which Cen Shen's poet-narrators “see” the thermal landscape through
manners of focalization found across the boundaries of individual poems, manners that are repeated in separate poems
which when read against each other reveal similarities in not just what is focalized but how it is focalized. See also the
second chapter of this thesis for a brief discussion of intertextuality as it pertains, in a limited way, to a juxtaposed
reading of Cen Shen's and Bao Zhao's frontier poetry.
15 “World” here meaning the macro-space within which existents of the setting are selected by the focalizer for attention, or