Andrew H. Plaks

Andrew Henry Plaks (Chinese: 浦安迪; pinyin: Pǔ Āndí; born 1945) is an American sinologist who specializes in the study of the vernacular fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties. From 1973 to 2007 he taught at Princeton University, becoming full professor in 1980. He moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007, where he is currently Professor of East Asian Studies.

In 1968 he married Livia Basch (1947–2013), and the couple have two sons, Jason and Eric.

Plaks studied as an undergraduate in the Department of Oriental Studies at Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude with an A.B. in 1967. He stayed on at Princeton University for graduate study in East Asian Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1973 with a dissertation on Archetype and allegory in the Hung-Lou Meng. He was subsequently offered a position in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, becoming an associate professor in 1976, and a full professor in 1980. In 2007 he retired from Princeton University, and moved to Israel to take up a position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is currently Professor of East Asian Studies.

Plaks' 1987 book Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel, which won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize is an analysis of a group of Ming dynasty novels which Plaks argues changed the genre: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Jin Ping Mei, and Journey to the West. Ellen Widmer, writing in the Journal of Asian Studies, says that the book creates "a far-reaching hypothesis about the consolidation of the novel form in China", namely that the four novels can be taken as a milestone. He identifies a "figural density" and establishes that the key to understanding the novels is the use of irony, by which he means "every possible disjunction between what is said and what is meant". According to Plaks the novels ask serious questions about sexuality, selfhood, heroism, power, reality, and they offer serious Neo-Confucian answers.

...
Wikipedia