foreword
chapter 1  the old english （anglo-saxon）period·beowulf·themiddle english period beowulf·the middle english period
chapter 2  chaucer·the pre elizabethan period·more
chapter 3  the elizabethan age·spenser·sidney·marlowe
chapter 4  shakespeare·bacon·jonson·king james' bible
chapter 5  the 17th century·donne·milton·dryden·bunyan·therestoration theater
chapter 6  the classicage·pope·johnson·gray·goldsmith·sheridan
chapter 7  movement towardromanticism·thomson·young·cowper, crabbe·blake·bums
chapter 8  18th-centuryfiction·swift·defoe·richardson·fielding·sterne·smollett
chapter 9  the romanticperiod·wordsworth·coleridge·scott·austen
chapter 10  byron·shelley·keats
chapter 11  the victorian period·victorianprose·carlyle·mill·newman
chapter 12  victorian fiction·dickens·thackeray
chapter 13  charlotte and emily bronte·meredith
chapter 14  george eliot·trollope·butler
chapter 15  hardy·gissing·moore·wilde·stevenson
chapter 16  victorian poetry·tennyson·browning·arnold
chapter 17  clough·hopkins·edward fitzgerald's rubaiyat·theaesthetic movement
chapter 18  victorian drama·shaw·wilde
chapter 19  the early 20th century·the edwardians·thegeorgians·the war poets
chapter 20  the 1920s·woolf·joyce
chapter 21  lawrence·yeats·imagism·t. s. eliot
chapter 22  poetry of the 1930s·auden·the audenicgroup·thomas·empson
chapter 23  fiction of the1930s·huxley·orweu·waugh·greene·isherwood
chapter 24  postwar poetry
chapter 25  postwar fiction
chapter 26  postwar drama
notes and references
index