The Literary Bearing of Chicago's 1893 World's Parliament of Religions ERIC J. ZIOLKOWSKI THE RENEWED SCHOLARLY and theological interest in the 1893 Chicago World's Parliament of Religions, an interest that has been reflected iti a slew of studies and conferences done on the subject over the past decade and a half, promises to reach its climax this autumn with a number of planned centenary celebrations of the event in Chicago and other places. As an unprecedented meeting of represen- tatives of the world's major religions, the parliament allowed certain Eastern faiths to be presented for the first time in America by spokesmen of their own, and is justifiably remembered for having stimulated Western sympathy and curiosity in Eastern spirituality, en- couraged the study of comparative religion in American universities, and for having helped foster the Hdialogue" between East. and West. However, amidst all the retrospective attention the parliament has received, one of its most interesting legacies has gone unnoticed: its bearing on subsequent Western literature. That literary scholars have completely ignored the religion parlia- ment as a topic pertinent to their subject is .consistent with the modern Western habit of construing religion and literature as separate spheres. This tendency explains why the Congress Auxiliary of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition, the great world's fair under whose auspices the parliament was beld (during September 11-27), also sponsored a Con- on Literature two months earlier (July 10-15), but no effort to establish any formal link between the two meetings. Such compart- mentalization was highly ironic, since the idea which inspired the religion parliament had deep roots in the Western literary tradition. As Max Muller would observe the following year (in an article in The Arena, vol. 11) with regard to comparisons made between the 1893 10