Le Daiyun (January 10, 1931 - July 27, 2024) was a pioneer and founder of the discipline of comparative literature in China. She was a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University.

biography

Born in Guiyang, Guizhou in 1931, Yue Daiyun possesses Miao ancestry, with her grandmother being a member of the Miao ethnic group. Her father, Yue Senwei, was a professor in the English Department of Guizhou University. Influenced by her family, she began reading foreign literature from junior high school, including works such as "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", "Jane Eyre", "The Three Musketeers", "Gone with the Wind", "The Bible", and "Lady Chatterley's Lover", deeply influenced by Western culture.

In the 1948 college entrance examination, he was determined to go to Beijing. Initially, he applied to the Foreign Languages Department of Peking University, but later, with the appreciation of Shen Congwen, he entered the Chinese Department of Peking University. During his university years, he devoted himself to the revolutionary cause of the Chinese Communist Party and joined the underground organization, the Democratic Youth League, responsible for proofreading progressive books from the liberated areas. In 1952, he graduated and stayed on campus to teach.

In 1957, she was labeled as a rightist and sent to the countryside for labor reform. In 1962, she returned to Peking University and was assigned to the library reference room as a casual position for document sorting. During the Cultural Revolution, she was impacted again due to her husband Tang Yijie being criticized. After the Cultural Revolution, Le Daiyun was assigned to teach modern literature to European and American students at Peking University. In 1981, she had the opportunity to go abroad and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in the United States. In 1982, she transferred to the Department of Oriental Culture at the University of California, Berkeley as a visiting scholar. During her time in the United States, she encountered the discipline of comparative literature and introduced research findings from this field back to China, laying the foundation for the discipline of comparative literature research in China. She served as the director of the Chinese Department at Shenzhen University, a professor of modern literature and comparative literature at Peking University, a doctoral supervisor, the director of the Cross-Cultural Research Center, a professor at the School of Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University, and the president of the China Comparative Literature Association. She passed away in Beijing in the early morning of July 27, 2024, at the age of 93.