| The T'ang poetic journey grows out of an earlier tradition of representing journeys in Chinese literature--in Ch'u tz'u, fu, and the travel poetry of the Six Dynasties. In comparison with the earlier poetic journey, the T'ang poetic journey is characterized by its articulation in certain fixed phases, each of which gradually developed into a subgenre. The aim of this study is to investigate the genealogy of the T'ang poetic journey by restructuring those phases using the set terms in titles of poems and the sequence of the process of a journey.;As an introduction to the central problem of the T'ang poetic journey, I start, in the first chapter, with the demonic river, the hard road and the problematic door in poems by Li Po and Li Ho. These reveal a psychological complexity alternating between fear and desire in the poetic experience of travel. When fear is presented through excessive description of a dangerous landscape and warnings, the traveler is usually frozen into silence or stasis, in which desire is enacted through the active presentation of the landscape and the voice of admonition. In the second chapter I focus on the first phase, parting, and explore the poetics of the occasional parting poetry in terms of the topological structure of Sung landscape painting. Here can be seen how parting poems are dominated by a pattern that creates continuity against discontinuity. The third chapter concerns the phase of setting out, with special attention given to the most common version, setting out early. Through a study both of the landscape and of the traveler's various experiences in this phase, we see that the special effect of the dawn light, in between dimness and brightness, has great descriptive and expressive force in presenting feelings of attachment, disorientation, expansion and so forth. The fourth chapter, which moves to the phase of being on the way, focuses on the relation between place and experience. From the many variations on this phase, I have chosen to examine the themes of "staying overnight at a lodge," "mooring at the shore" and "passing by ancient sites." The last chapter discusses the dialectics of strange land and homeland in the psychological processes that occur as the traveler returns. |
