A Reappraisal of Shanshui shi from the Liu-Song (420-479 CE) and High Tang Eras (712-770

This dissertation seeks to critique prevailing narratives governing the reception of medieval Chinese Shanshui shi, or "mountains and waters" poetry, in modern scholarship. It asserts that rather than seeking to uncover what inspired the emergence of Shanshui lyricism, modern critics and scholars have relied heavily on the discourses of Western Romanticism to read this unique genre of Chinese lyricism as a version "landscape poetry." In response, the project contends that in stark contrast to the poetics which inform the creation of landscapes, the advent of medieval Chinese Shanshui poetry was predicated upon a revision of deontological conceptualizations of natural beauty revised from early Chinese political theory, and an intersubjective lyrical perspective shaped in part by divinatory readings of patterns authored by the "mountains and waters" themselves. This initial intervention allows the possibility of embracing an understanding of Shanshui poetry that rejects normative trends of interpretation, as well as a novel reevaluation of the concepts and techniques that informed the practice of Shanshui lyricism in China's early medieval period. The remainder of the study furthers these arguments by abandoning monologic narratives of historical development in favor of three parallel essays which reexamine the practice of Shanshui presentation during the High Tang era outside the constrictive bounds of landscape. Chapter 3 focuses on the verse that emerged from the lyrical depiction of the specific region and locales of Mount Lu, illustrating the power of merged literary and religious histories to shape and bend the verse of even the most iconoclastic and individualistic Shanshui poets. Chapter 4 resituates the aesthetics emptiness within the ancient motif of "forgetting," tracing the development of a new poetic vocabulary in High Tang Shanshui poetry informed by lyrical performances of blindness, deafness, and forgetting. The concluding chapter returns to the issues of deontological beauty and Shanshui appreciation in High Tang verse to reveal that the foundational motifs of Six Dynasties Shanshui lyricism were still widely by Chinese poets living in the eighth century.