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In the first book-length study of friendship in China, I examine the significant body of texts composed among elite male friends in the mid-Tang era (c. 780-830), the cultural watershed of late medieval China. I explore a wide range of texts--such as letters, exchange poems, prefaces to collections, and funerary texts--by more than a dozen writers in the networks of Han Yu and Bai Juyi to demonstrate the increasing visibility of friendship as a social relation and its importance to literary composition in the mid-Tang. My analysis of the literature of friendship--writing by, for, and about men defined as friends--will reveal how late medieval writers worked together to transform "wen," literature in its broadest sense.