Part 1 Ancient Greek and Roman Literature 3
Chapter 1 Ancient Greek Literature 3
Chapter 2 Greek Mythology 6
Chapter 3 Homer's Epics 13
Chapter 4 Ancient Greek Drama 23
Chapter 5 Ancient Roman Literature 31
Part 2 Medieval Literature in Europe 41
Chapter 1 Introduction 41
Chapter 2 Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy 47
Part 3 Renaissance Literature in Europe 61
Chapter 1 Introduction 61
Chapter 2 Giovanni Boccaccio and the Decameron 68
Chapter 3 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Don Quixote 75
Chapter 4 William Shakespeare and Hamlet 84
Part 4 Seventeenth-century Literature in Europe 111
Chapter 1 Introduction 111
Chapter 2 Molière and Tartuffe 118
Part 5 Eighteenth-century Literature in Europe 133
Chapter 1 Introduction 133
Chapter 2 Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe 147
Chapter 3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Julie,or New Heloise,the Confession 156
Chapter 4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Faust,The Sorrows of Young Werther 163
Part 6 Nineteenth-century Western Literature 177
Chapter 1 Romanticism 177
Chapter 2 George Gordon Byron and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 188
Chapter 3 Victor Hugo and Notre-Dame de Paris 196
Chapter 4 Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin and Eugene Onegm 204
Part 7 Nineteenth-century Western Literature 213
Chapter 1 Realistic Literature 213
Chapter 2 Stendhal and The Red and the Black 221
Chapter 3 Honoré de Balzac and Old Goriot 228
Chapter 4 Charles Dickens and Great Expectations 240
Chapter 5 The Brontё Sisters and Their Novels 253
Chapter 6 Thomas Hardy and Tess of the d'Urbervilles 269
Chapter 7 Nikolai Gogol and Dead Souls 280
Chapter 8 Leo Tolstoy and Anna Karenina 288
Chapter 9 Naturalism and Other Literary Trends 300
Part 8 Twentieth-century Western Literature 311
Chapter 1 Introduction 311
Chapter 2 D.H.Lawrence and Sons and Loves 321
Chapter 3 T.S.Eliot and The Waste Land 331
Chapter 4 Virginia Woolf and Mrs.Dalloway 339
Chapter 5 Franz Kafka and The Castle 347
Chapter 6 Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot 356
Chapter 7 Joseph Heller and Catch-22 363
Chapter 8 Gabriel Garcia Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude 375
Chapter 9 Maksim Gorky and Mother 387
Part 9 Oriental Literature 399
Chapter 1 Introduction 399
Chapter 2 Hebrew Literature Canon:The Old Testament 404
Chapter 3 Kalidasa and Shakuntala 416
Chapter 4 Arabian Nights 422
Chapter 5 Murasaki Shikibu and The Tale of Genji 428
Chapter 6 Natsume Soseki and I Am a Cat 436
Chapter 7 Rabindranath Tagore and Gitanjali 442
Chapter 8 Yasunari Kawabata and Snow Country 454
Bibliography 461