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Conclusion
Overview
Chapter one of this thesis briefly addressed historical circumstances that were relevant to the
writing of Tang frontier poetry, defined the term “frontier” (biansai 边 塞 ), and provided a short
introduction to the geography of the Chinese frontier as it appeared around the mid-eighth century.
Chapter two followed by presenting the tripartite thematic structure of frontier poetry used in this thesis
– responses to frontier warfare, encounters with non-Chinese cultures, and descriptions of borderland
environments – and discussed several pre-Tang poetic texts displaying these themes as being literary
precursors to Tang frontier poetry. Chapter three commenced with an overview of critical concerns with
the limitations and unintended effects of grouping both poetry and poets under a “frontier poetry”
heading. The chapter then continued by demonstrating how during the Tang, especially the High Tang
period, the themes of frontier poetry were complicated and enriched by a number of poets whose
literary talents and frontier experiences brought the subgenre to its apotheosis.
Part two, chapters four through six, shifted attention to a specific coordinate within the realm of
frontier poetry – Cen Shen's frontier poems in which the frontier landscape itself is a prominent feature
of the texts. Chapter four opened with an overview of critical commentary characterizing Cen Shen's
frontier poetry as 奇 (qi, strange; unusual). The chapter then introduced and exemplified aspects of
focalization that are used in chapters five and six to discuss Cen Shen's frontier landscapes outside the
conventional “strange” or “unusual” paradigm.
Chapter five examined Cen Shen's “hot” and “cold” frontier landscapes by exploring underlying
manners of focalization repeated by the texts' poet-narrators in their perceptualization of these
conspicuously “thermal” (hot) and “hibernal” (cold) frontier settings. The first section's discussion of