This massive book is intended, the author tells us, to serve as an extended preface to an extraordinary publishing venture by Garland Publishing Company of New York, which has undertaken to republish one hundred and twenty-one religious novels.

...It is largely composed of plot
summaries and as such is more of a reference work than an analytical critique, and even here the tendency to generalize and the lack of adequate footnotes detract from its status as a satisfactory work of reference....

....Unfortunately Professor Wolff does not redeem his limited approach by meticulous scholarship-even on the historical front where he claims to feel more at home....

....This work does not significantly advance this field of studies beyond Margaret Maison's far briefer The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961; published in England as Search Your Soul, Eustace).

---ELISABETH JAY, Westminster College