Yan Jiayan

Yan Jiayan, born in 1933, is a scholar of modern Chinese literature. He long taught in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University, where he was a senior professor and doctoral supervisor, and he served as department head and as president of the Modern Chinese Literature Research Association. He co-edited A History of Modern Chinese Literature with Tang Tao and is the author of A History of Schools of Modern Chinese Fiction and Collected Essays in Pursuit of Truth, among other works. His research on fiction schools and on individual writers is distinguished by solid materials and careful analysis. In his studies of Lu Xun's fiction he proposed a “polyphonic novel” reading, and he was an early academic discussant of Jin Yong's martial arts novels, bringing them into university classrooms and repeatedly revising his related manuscript. Textbooks he edited, such as Selected Works of Modern Chinese Literature, provide reliable anthologies for teaching and research.