ABSTRACT

This book guides through some six centuries of English literature, beginning with Chaucer's time, and goes on to analyse the background, interconnections and major achievements of individual writers in each period. It is useful to the student of English literature and to the general reader.

chapter 1|18 pages

The fourteenth century

chapter 2|12 pages

Fifteenth-century poetry and prose

chapter 3|9 pages

The early sixteenth century

chapter 6|14 pages

Elizabethan poetry

chapter 7|16 pages

Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry

chapter 8|14 pages

Elizabethan and seventeenth-century prose

chapter 9|12 pages

Milton to Dryden

chapter 10|14 pages

Restoration drama

chapter 11|9 pages

Origins of the novel

chapter 12|21 pages

The age of Swift and Pope

chapter 13|20 pages

The age of Johnson

chapter 14|16 pages

The eighteenth-century novel

chapter 15|14 pages

The close of the eighteenth century

chapter 16|24 pages

Wordsworth and the Romantics

chapter 17|15 pages

Scott and contemporary novelists

chapter 18|31 pages

Victorian poetry

chapter 19|30 pages

The Victorian novel

chapter 20|22 pages

Twentieth-century drama

chapter 21|30 pages

Twentieth-century poetry

chapter 22|41 pages

The twentieth-century novel