One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China

By Anna M. Shields

The friendships of writers of the mid-Tang era (780s-820s)--between literary giants like Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, Han Yu and Meng Jiao, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi--became famous through the many texts they wrote to and about one another. What inspired mid-Tang literati to write about their friendships with such zeal? And how did these writings influence Tang literary culture more broadly? In One Who Knows Me , the first book to delve into friendship in medieval China, Anna M. Shields explores the literature of the mid-Tang to reveal the complex value its writers discovered in friendship--as a rewarding social practice, a rich literary topic, a way to negotiate literati identity, and a path toward self-understanding. Shields traces the evolution of the performance of friendship through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts, and interweaves elegant translations with close readings of these texts. For mid-Tang literati, writing about friendship became a powerful way to write about oneself and to reflect upon a shared culture. Their texts reveal the ways that friendship intersected the public and private realms of experience and, in the process, reshaped both.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674504372
• ISBN13: 9780674504370
• Release Date: April 2015
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 425 Pages
• Weight: 1.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.5"