1 Old English Literature 1
Beowulf 1
'The Seafarer'and'The Wanderer' 5
Battle Poems and'The Dream of the Rood' 7
Old English Language 9
2 Middle English Literature 11
From the Norman Conquest to Chaucer 11
Julian of Norwich,Margery Kempe,Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 13
Geoffrey Chaucer,William Dunbar,Robert Henryson 17
William Langland,Medieval Drama,Thomas Malory 21
3 Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose 26
Sir Thomas Wy 26
Sixteenth-Century Prose and the Reformation 28
The Sonnet:Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare 32
Edmund Spenser 37
4 Shakespeare 41
Shakespeare in Context 41
Shakespeare's Comedies and Histories 43
Shakespeare's Tragedies 47
Shakespeare's Late Plays 52
5 Renaissance and Restoration Drama 55
Renaissance Drama and Christopher Marlowe 55
Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy 60
Ben Jonson and the Masque 62
Restoration Drama 65
6 Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Prose 69
John Donne 69
From Ben Jonson to John Bunyan and Andrew Marvell 73
John Milton 81
John Dryden 85
7 The Eighteenth Century 88
Alexander Pope 88
The Augustan Age 93
Edward Gibbon,Samuel Johnson 97
Sensibility 99
8 The Novel:The First Hundred Years 102
Daniel Defoe 102
Aphra Behn,Samuel Richardson,Henry Fielding,Laurence Sterne,Tobias Smollett 105
From Eliza Haywood to Mary Shelley 110
Walter Scott and Jane Austen 112
9 The Romantic Period 115
The Age of Revolution 115
William Blake,William Wordsworth,Samuel Taylor Coleridge 117
Lord Byron,Percy Bysshe Shelley,John Keats 123
Radical Voices 126
10 Victorian Literature,1837-1857 128
Charles Dickens 128
Charlotte and Emily Bront？ 131
William Makepeace Thackeray,Elizabeth Gaskell 135
Alfred Lord Tennyson,Robert Browning,Elizabeth Barrett Browning 138
11 Victorian Literature,1857-1876 143
Victorian Thinkers 143
George Eliot 146
Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel 150
Anthony Trollope,Christina Rossetti 153
12 Victorian Literature,1876-1901 157
Thomas Hardy 157
George Gissing,George Moore,Samuel Butler,Henry James,Robert Louis Stevenson 161
Rudyard Kipling 165
George Bernard Shaw,Oscar Wilde,Late Victorian Poetry 167
13 The Twentieth Century:The Early Years 170
Joseph Conrad 170
Arnold Bennett,H.G.Wells,E.M.Forster,Katherine Mansfield 174
D.H.Lawrence 177
Georgian Poetry,War Poetry,W.B.Yeats 180
14 The Twentieth Century:Between the Wars 186
T.S.Eliot 186
James Joyce 190
Virginia Woolf 195
The 1930s 198
15 The Twentieth Century:The Second World War to the End of the Millennium 202
Wartime and Post-War Britain 202
Drama 205
Novels 209
Poetry 213
16 Postscript 217
The Twenty-First Century 217
Periods of English Literature and Language 221
Chronology 222
Further Reading 253