CONTENTS:

1. Anglo-Saxon Prelude

2. The Age of Chaucer
     Poets of the Fourteenth Century
     The End of Middle Ages

3. The English Renaissance
     Pre-Elizabethan Verse and Prose

4. The Elizabethan Age
     The Rise of the English Drama
     Shakespearian Heyday
     "The Faerie Queene"
     "Rare Ben Jonson"
     Song-writers and Sonneteers
     Courtier Poets
     Elizabethan Prose

5. The Seventeenth Century
     The Jacobean Drama
     King James’s Bible
     Bacon and the Pursuit of Truth
     Poets Sacred and Profane
     Prose Writers
     John Milton
     Later Seventeenth-Century Prose
     Diarists
     Later Seventeenth-Century Verse
     Tragedy and Comedy
     Restoration Comedy
     John Dryden

6. The Eighteenth Century
     Alexander Pope
     Swift and the Age of Anne
     The Birth of the Modern Novel
     Eighteenth-Century Verse
     The Growth of the Novel
     Johnson and Boswell
     Eighteenth-Century Prose
     Gothic Fantasy
     Sheridan and the Comedy of Manners

7. The Nineteenth Century
     Crabbe and the Romantic Revolution
     The Nineteenth-Century Novel
     Critics, Essayists and Men of Letters
     The Art of Prose
     Later Nineteenth-Century Verse
     The Pre-Raphaelite Poets
     The Aesthetic Movement

8. Twentieth-Century Epilogue
     The Novel
     The New Novel
     English Verse 1914-45
     The Drama
     Critics and Biographers