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BOOK REVIEWS 573 the cases of Europe versus America. The jury, apparently, is still out, as to whether this is more a question of degree rather than kind, but, Yu reminds his readers that the free exercise of religion even in Western liberal democracies is always in flux. For example, in contrast to the predominantly negative perception of religion in institutions of higher learning in Europe and America-where liberal education is often considered liberationfrom religion-China expresses interest in Christianity, albeit, primarily, as an agent of modernization. In conclusion, an obstacle to inquiry on Asian literature and religion is the general fact that Asianists are burdened with not only having to master the vast literatures of their own comparative traditions-languages and cultures more diverse than those represented by Europe-but are required to be conversant with the Western canon as well. Given these constraints, high-level, comparative scholarship of Western and Eastern cultures has not had much success. One encouraging sign that this situation is shifting is the trend of graduate students from Asia becoming increasingly visible in the North American graduate schools. Perhaps a growing number of these budding scholars will competently engage in genuine, comparative work. A great deal of analytical work remains to be done, yet given the enormousness of the canon-very little has actually been translated-our understanding of Chinese literature and religion is tied to a question of availability. For the time being, in resisting the strong tendency to harmonize Asian and European traditions as parallel-Confucius is "our" Plato-Yu represents a maturing of comparative literary studies that neither dismisses nor equates the texts under comparison. Mike T.Sugimoto Pepperdine University Religion and the Muse: The Vexed Relation between Religion and Western Literature. By Ernest Rubenstein. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. ISBN 0-7914-7149-4. Pp. xi + 262. $70.00. Religion and the Muse presents a vivid historical portrait of the sometimes congenial, sometimes tense but always fertile relationship between religion and literature. Calling upon a wide range of philosophical and literary figures, from Plato to Kant, Homer to Milton, Edmund Gosse to Willa Cather, Rubenstein offers textual readings that underscore how each side engages questions oftruth, morality, imagination, and the purpose of storytelling. The text is divided into three sections. The first concerns mutual critiques of religion and literature. Rubenstein argues that the monotheistic traditions, concerned as they are with doctrine and truth, find the literary imagination suspicious, and criticize literary invention for its falseness. Using Plato as a key 574 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE point of origin for the persistent notion in the west that "the false and the wicked correlate" (33), Rubenstein finds a primary critique of literature by religion not in the notion that fiction is necessarily evil but rather that "at its best it models and therefore inculcates evil behavior" (31). Literature, in turn, can accuse religion of a dogmatic worldview that allows for only one possible meaning of any given religious myth or story, thus closing off the world of the literary imagination. The second section on theoretic concerns focuses on the ways in which religion and literature accommodate one another, and share mutual interests. Literary attention to creativity, beauty, and aesthetic experience find their analogies in religious ideas of the "creation of the world, the beauty of holiness and religious experience" (83). Rubenstein uses Plato's Timaeus and Genesis 1-3 to elucidate both how wide-ranging and similar ideas of creation can be and to show how human artistic creativity has been both dismissed and praised when compared to God's creative ability. Rubenstein also traces the history of the idea of beauty, arguing that beauty "Simultaneously tantalizes and troubles both religion and literature" because of the difficulty of defining the nature of beauty. "Part of the distress beauty causes literary theorists is over [beauty's] definition, which remains contested to this day; while religions, for their part ... are unsure whether the lure of beauty, however defined, serves their own highest ends or not" (112). For Plato, beauty leads us to the Good (115), which places beauty on the side of the gods or God in later theological tradition; at...

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