Excursion, Estates, and the Kingly Gaze: The Landscape Poetry of Xie Lingyun

My dissertation situates Six Dynasty landscape poetry within traditions of youlan ("excursion and the panoptic view)", whose generic conventions were codified in medieval literary anthologies and commonplace compendiums. By deploying this medieval category, I bring into focus the relationship between landscape poetry and actual excursion practices such as imperial tours and surveys to prospect land for development. The significance of this approach is that it allows us to contextualize landscape poetry within a broader intellectual history that reaches back to pre-Qin debates about the ruler's use of natural resources, and the political and economic stakes of writing within this tradition in the medieval period. Whereas previous scholars have focused on natural landscape, I call attention to landscaped nature---the manmade parks and engineered playgrounds that were crucial to early Chinese representations of excursion. Using Xie Lingyun (385--433), widely hailed as the progenitor of Chinese landscape poetry, as a case study, I show landscape excursion to be a literary performance organized around imperial impersonation, and a body of practices on the ground that rehearsed and mirrored the authority and functions of the state.