This book describes the challenge to traditional Christian beliefs that was inherent in the very concept of literary Realism and presents the Catholic novel as a series of conscious readaptations of Realist techniques and models. Authors studied include Flaubert, Bernanos and Mauriac.

The sceptical mode; the limping devil of Barbey d'Aurevilly; Zola's new testament; Huysmans and the art of conversion; the symbolist imagination of Leon Bloy; belief and narrative form in the novels of Francois Mauriac; Julien Green's scale of realities; the Bernanosian Synthesis.