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