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Part One: Overview of High Tang Frontier Poetry
Introductory Remarks
Part one of the thesis seeks to acquaint the reader with the core thematic concerns of Chinese
frontier poetry, and to show how during the High Tang (sheng Tang 盛 唐 ) period, especially those
years prior to the outbreak of the An Lushan rebellion, poets writing within the frontier poetry subgenre
treated its major themes with a degree of depth and complexity that often far surpassed thematically
similar texts of preceding eras. The three chapters comprising this first part of the thesis are also meant
to establish a background for part two's more precise investigations into one specific aspect of frontier
poetry, that of focalization in Cen Shen's frontier landscapes.
Chapter one is an introductory overview of historical and cultural factors influencing the
impetus among many learned men to serve on China's frontier, actions which in turn impacted the
writing of frontier poetry. The chapter also defines “frontier” (biansai 边 塞 ), and then acquaints the
reader with the geographic frontier through a short tour of the Tang borderlands as revealed through
excerpts of several Tang dynasty frontier poems.
Chapter two then discusses several pre-Tang poetic works which anticipate three core thematic
elements of Chinese frontier poetry: responses to frontier war, both of those dispatched to the border
and those far from military clashes yet who were still affected by the phenomenon; descriptions of
encounters with the people and customs of China's borderlands; and illustrations of the geography and
meteorological conditions of these regions. When relevant, the chapter also juxtaposes examples of
Tang frontier poetry with these early thematic precedents in order to connect such early thematic
stirrings with texts that have since come to be regarded as the epitome of the subgenre.
Finally, chapter three explores how a number of Tang poets, most notably Gao Shi and Cen
Shen, remained within the basic conventions of the subgenre yet also enhanced the thematic scope of