The Anglo-Saxon Period 449-1066 1
Introduction 1
The Venerable Bede and Caedmon 2
King Alfred the Great 4
Beowulf 5
The Exeter Book 8
The Medieval Period 1066-1485 11
Introduction 11
Medieval Romance 14
Folk Ballads 18
John Wyclifie and William Langland 23
Drama in the Middle Ages 26
Geoffrey Chaucer 28
The Elizabethan Age 1485-1625 34
Introduction 34
Thomas More 37
SirPhilip Sidney 42
Edmund Spenser 45
Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh 49
Minor Playwrights 55
William Shakespeare 58
Francis Bacon 72
King James Bible 75
The Seventeenth Century 1625-1700 77
Introdution 77
Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets 80
John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets 86
John Milton 94
John Bunyan 100
John Dryden 101
The Age of Neo-Classicism 1700-1764 106
Introduction 106
Alexander Pope 109
Jonathan Swift 113
Richard Steele and Joseph Addison 116
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell 119
TheNovel of the Eighteenth Century 124
Daniel Defoe 125
Samuel Richardson 130
Henry Fielding 132
Tobias Smollett 134
Laurence Sterne 137
Oliver Goldsmith 138
Pre-Romantic Period 1764-1798 141
Introduction 141
Horace Walpole 143
Ann Radcliffe 144
Thomas Gray 147
Robert Burns 150
William Blake 154
The Romantic Age 1798-1837 160
Introduction 160
William Wordsworth 163
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 172
George Gordon Lord Byron 180
Percy Bysshe Shelley 189
John Keats 197
William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb 203
Mary Shelley 212
Sir Walter Scott 214
Jane Austen 217
The Victorian Age 1837-1901 224
Introdution 224
Alfred Tennyson 228
Robert Browning 233
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 240
Charles Dickens 242
William Makepeace Thackeray 249
Matthew Arnold 252
The Brontё Sisters 257
Thomas Hardy 264
Oscar Wilde 272
The Modernist Age 1901-1945 279
Introdution 279
William Butler Yeats 282
T.S.Eliot 288
W.H.Auden 296
Joseph Conrad 300
James Joyce 305
The Postmodern Period 1945-Present 319
Introduction 319
Samuel Beckett 321
Harold Pinter 326
William Golding 331
Doris Lessing 335
Bibliography 340
Index 346