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Tang dynasty. As discovered quite early during the initial research stage of this thesis, very little
criticism has been conducted in North America on the early stirrings and later developments of Chinese
frontier poetry; to date, the only major resources available has been research conducted by Marie
Chan , Ronald Miao and Tsung-Cheng Lin in his forthcoming publication on the relationship between
frontier poetry and knight-errantry. The research contained herein thus had to incorporate numerous
Chinese language secondary source materials to form a solid analysis of frontier poetry's origins, prime
concerns and blossoming in the High Tang period that could be accessible to those who are unable to
read Chinese.
The key issues in part two of the thesis, that of explaining intertextual patterns of focalization
found in Cen Shen's frontier poetry where the thermal, hibernal and distant landscapes feature
prominently, were more specialized than those discussed in the first three chapters. It was also in this
second part, in particular chapters five and six, that the thesis endeavoured to make its strongest
contribution to research in classical Chinese poetry by exploring focalization in Cen Shen's poetry.
Such an undertaking first required a theoretical model appropriate for the task, a framework which
provided consistency and clarity in analyzing and elucidating perceptual and psychological facets
common to Cen Shen's poet-narrators in their focalization of the thermal, hibernal and distant frontier
landscape. Using aspects of Manfred Jahn's, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's and Mieke Bal's writings on
focalization, a unique and unimposing theoretical apparatus was created to assist in demonstrating how
the poet-narrators of each type of frontier setting shared similarities in their manners of focalization.
The conclusions reached by such an application found that despite the separation between poems which
feature one particular type of frontier setting, the poems' poet-narrators nonetheless focalized such
settings in highly coordinated manners that echoed across the boundaries of individual texts. The
suggestion drawn from such realizations was that an underlying method of focalization linked disparate
texts through idiosyncratic methods of focalizing thermal, hibernal and distant frontier scenes.