Fellowship, Trust, and Knowledge: Performances of Friendship in Mid-Tang Poetry

Anna Shields will give a talk on friendship in Mid-Tang Dynasty poetry at Columbia University as a part of their Premodern China Research and Exchange Project.

As the works of Bai Juyi, Yuan Zhen, Han Yu and Meng Jiao have long shown us, mid-Tang literati forged close relationships with their peers and documented those relationships in a wide range of poetic and prose texts. The record of their friendships has helped us understand the dynamics of mid-Tang literary innovation, but it has rarely been examined for its portrayals of friendship as a social practice. In this talk, I discuss mid-Tang writers’ use of poetry as a way to perform friendship, focusing in particular on definitions of “friend” as a social role, and the meaning of friendship in the context of poetic exchange. The medieval discourse of friendship that these literati inherited was fragmented and partial, and yet some of the core values of the discourse — fellowship, trust, and knowledge being the three I consider here—proved especially urgent for men living in an era of increasing competition for status and power. Writing about and within the framework of literati friendship allowed these poets to debate critical issues of mid-Tang culture, such as the difficulty of establishing literary reputation and navigating political careers, and also gave them the chance to defend new ideals of friendship, ideals that they reconceived to answer those pressing questions.