Name: One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China
ISBN: 9780674504370

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

Anna M. Shields

Hardcover

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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.

Book Details

Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publish Date: Apr 13rd, 2015
Pages: 425
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.50in - 6.10in - 1.20in - 1.40lb
EAN: 9780674504370
Categories: • Asian - Chinese• Asia - China• Europe - Medieval

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About the Author

Shields, Anna M.: - Anna M. Shields is Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

More books by Anna M. Shields

Book Cover for: Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Huajian Ji (Collection from Among the Flowers), Anna M. Shields

What people are saying

JasNuss

@SipCourage

1 year

A #miracle is never lost. It may touch many people you have not even met. https://t.co/anPZWUc8ZJ…

The 5th book just ripped into my heart writing it…I can honestly and openly tell you that I have been advised by the “One Who Knows” that I should relax while I proceed with the suggested promotion of this book series. https://t.co/aXC2nK052z https://t.co/FmCupSADcA

Learning aims at #change and always its #purpose. Are you satisfied with your changes? (Search your concerns at my blog:) https://t.co/iKQMWumwhs

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Praise for this book

Exemplary in its scholarship and written with great human warmth and compassion, this book examines friendship among the literati of late eighth- and early ninth-century China as both an impetus to writing and as a social act. Through superb translations and acute interpretation, Shields opens a window on many heretofore neglected aspects of Tang-dynasty culture. Readers will be enlightened, captivated, and often emotionally moved to a degree unusual in an academic study. A book that brings the medieval past alive.--Paul W. Kroll, University of Colorado Boulder

What people are saying

JasNuss

@SipCourage

1 year

A #miracle is never lost. It may touch many people you have not even met. https://t.co/anPZWUc8ZJ…

Learning aims at #change and always its #purpose. Are you satisfied with your changes? (Search your concerns at my blog:) https://t.co/iKQMWumwhs

twitter.com