This thoroughly engaging volume by an eminent comparatist examines the relevance of literature in modern life, with particular attention paid to the value of Comparative Literature as a field of study. In a series of essays, Eoyang challenges recent attempts to supplant Comparative Literature or announce its demise. He celebrates its viability as a discipline, its response to the Western biases of World Literature, its role as an alternative to multiculturalism's marketing of the Other, and its relationship to translation. Eoyang presents Comparative Literature as a multilingual 'undisciplined discipline' that seeks to bridge cultural incommensurability.

Dorothy Figueira, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Georgia, USA, Honorary President, International Comparative Literature Association, Editor of Recherche littéraire/Literary Research

With departments of literature (including comparative and national literatures) being shut down across the United States, a text that opens with the question 'Why Study Literature'-and more importantly, answers it compellingly-is absolutely timely. Eugene Eoyang is uniquely situated to write such a volume. His own background in Comparative Literature, his past presidency of the American Comparative Literature Association, his ability to work in both Western and Eastern literatures and languages, his familiarity with both the American higher education context and a major Asian university, all provide Eoyang with the depth and breadth of knowledge one needs for a project such as this one. His investigation of the relationship of literature to life and his defense of the 'useless' (by which Eoyang means something very important indeed) are much needed in today's economy and today's broader sense of cultures in contact.

Kathleen L. Komar, Professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA, USA.

The Promise and Premise of Creativity: Why Comparative Literature Matters is a book that has been crying to be written for the last several decades. The first part's exposition of the importance of literary study eloquently addresses many students' and some administrators' uncertainty about literature's value in a largely technological age in both a broad as well as deeply personal sense. The second considers some of the initial and regrettably long-persisting shortcomings and fallacious assumptions upon which comparative literature has been based. With Chinese as a case study, compelling solutions to a considerable number of these methodological problems are advanced in a wide-ranging international context. It is a superb volume and a significant contribution to the field in terms of its probing insight and critical sophistication.

Steven P. Sondrup, President, International Comparative Literature Association and Professor of Comparative Literature, Brigham Young University, USA.

Carefully researched and gracefully written with a comparative perspective, this book explores literature in the larger context of globalization and 'the clash of cultures' combining a range of theoretical approaches with a number of case-studies. Sticking firmly to refuting the position that the study of literature is 'useless,' Eugene Eoyang argues that it expands into three distinct intellectual skills: creative imagination, vicarious sympathy and capacious intuition. Eugene Eoyang claims that our sense of the world at large, of the salient similarities and differences between cultures, would be critically diminished without comparative literature.

Yang Naiqiao, Chair and Professor of Program of Comparative Literature & World Literature in Department of Chinese Language & Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, People's Republic of China