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the An Lushan rebellion poems that have since come to be classified as “frontier poetry” were more
complex than in preceding centuries in their treatment of the subgenre's standard themes of responses
to frontier warfare, descriptions of borderland geography, and encounters with non-Chinese peoples
inhabiting the
borderlands. The second goal was to contextualize the later analysis of focalization in Cen Shen's
thermal, hibernal and distant landscapes. An early fear that had arisen during the preparatory stages of
this thesis was that a narrow focus alone on Cen Shen's frontier environments, regardless of the
analytical approach, could skewer readers' perceptions of the poet's topical range, which, to an extent,
has unfortunately occurred given the thesis's necessary neglect of Cen Shen's non-frontier poetry, and
lead not to misunderstandings per se but rather result in a lack of awareness that Cen Shen's frontier
poems, as seen in chapter three, touched upon other aspects of serving on the frontier, such as the
experience of living for extended periods of time in an unfamiliar cultural environment. In order to
avoid the potential impression that Cen Shen's thermal, hibernal and distant landscapes were the single
embodiment of his, or even all, frontier poetry, it was felt that the subgenre needed to be first discussed
diachronically before refining the scope of analysis on one particular feature. To do this, historical
factors affecting the writing of frontier poetry were first presented in chapter one before the subgenre's
main themes were introduced and exemplified by pre-Tang poetic precursors. Discussions of other
frontier poems by Tang period poets working within the subgenre were included in chapter three to
assist in better appreciating the continuum within which Cen Shen's frontier poems were written while
also showing how his texts distinguished themselves from both earlier and contemporaneous efforts in
the field.
A far humbler motivation for writing the first three chapters was to proffer a relatively in-depth
and critical overview which might assist those with little or no exposure to Chinese frontier poetry the
opportunity to become acquainted with the subgenre's core thematic elements and evolution during the