The dissertation focuses on the relationship between word and image in the works of the Chinese poet-artist Shen Zhou. Going beyond standard literary or art historical studies by adopting an interdisciplinary approach akin to that of modern culture studies, it investigates pertinent traditions and contemporary conditions in 15th-century Chinese thought, painting, poetry, and society in order to achieve a fuller understanding of literati painting as exemplified by Shen Zhou's work. Chapter One traces the theme of nature portrayed as landscape, the principal subject matter of literati painting, to its roots in Daoism and Confucianism: while the Daoist thought prevalent from the third to the sixth centuries accounts conceptually for the rise of landscape painting as an independent genre, Neo-Confucian thought, dominant since the eleventh century, placed man at the center of the landscape in literati paintings during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Chapter Two explores both formal and conceptual relations between Chinese poetry and painting and the interaction of pictorial image and inscription within one work. Three preeminent poetic devices identifiable in the earliest lyric poems constitute basic structural elements of the literati artist's self-inscribed paintings, where pictorial image and verbal text often form a rich network of allusions both to literary and to artistic traditions. The vital connection between the post-artist's life and his work is underscored in Chapter Three. Re-investigating the socio-economic and cultural (or socio-cultural?) contexts of Shen Zhou's life in Suzhou, the chapter also redefines what it meant to be an "artist literatus" in his time. The final chapter deals with Shen Zhou as a reader of earlier artists' work, and with the intended readers of his own. It argues that the way he and other Ming literati painters read verbal texts led them to redirect their response to earlier inscribed paintings from an emphasis on the pictorial representation of nature toward the inscribed text, which helped shape the canonical tradition of literati painting. The multidisciplinary perspective adopted throughout this study elucidates the conditions governing the production of these inscribed paintings and the significance they held for Shen Zhou's contemporaries.