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the thermal frontier concentrated on the poet-narrators' selfsame methods for introducing “themes” of
the thermal frontier landscape before examining the multifaceted “lenses” and “modes of focalization”
used by the poet-narrators to focalize particular “sub-themes” of the thermal landscape. The section
then concluded with an elucidation of the natural violence, and not mere “strangeness”, that
characterizes these settings of exceptional heat. The second section treated Cen Shen's hibernal frontier
setting as being predicated on underlying patterns of shifts in focalization that link disparate poems
through a nexus of perception. These connections were the poet-narrators' shifts in focalizing the
setting from perspectives of interiority and exteriority as well as distance and nearness, and alternations
of focalization between an environment qualified by activity and inactivity. Two types of coldness
focalized by the poet-narrators were also proposed in furthering support for the interrelatedness of the
poet-narrators' focalization of the hibernal frontier setting.
Finally, chapter six investigated relations between the poet-narrators' emotional states and the
perception of frontier landscapes of immense distances. Specifically, two aspects of the poet-narrators'
focalization of the frontier landscape were discussed in order to show how homesickness was revealed
through the poet-narrators' manners of focalization. The first of these aspects was the direction of the
poet-narrator's gaze, and how eastward, westward and indefinite spatial coordinates of focalization
were themselves expressions of homesickness and feelings of separation. The second aspect
investigated how Cen Shen's poet-narrators were further able to express a longing to return home by
focalizing features of mobility in the objects they perceived in the frontier landscape of great distances.
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Reasoning
The overview in part one of High Tang frontier poetry had two primary goals. One was to offer
a brief historical background to the writing of Tang frontier poetry, establish the subgenre's main
themes, and then to demonstrate how, and in some instances why, in the Tang prior to the outbreak of