CONTENTS:

BOOK I: THE PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
1. The Earliest Anglo-Saxon Poetry
2. Caedmon, Cynewulf, and Those About Them
3. Anglo-Saxon Prose
4. The Decadence of Anglo-Saxon

BOOK II: THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
1. The Transition
2. First Middle English Period 1200-1250
3. Second Middle English Period 1300-1360
4. Early Romances – Metrical
5. Early Romances – Alliterative

BOOK III: CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
1. Chaucer’s Life and Poems
2. Langland and Gower
3. Chaucer’s Prose – Wyclif, Trevisa, Mandeville

BOOK IV: THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
1. The English Chaucerians – Lydgate to Skelton
2. The Scottish Poets – Historical, Political, and Minor
3. The Four Great Scottish Poets
4. Later Romances in Prose and Verse
5. Minor Poetry and Ballads
6. Miscellaneous Prose

BOOK V: ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO THE DEATH OF SPENSER
1. Preliminaries – Drama
2. Preliminaries – Prose
3. Preliminaries – Verse
4. Spenser and His Contemporaries
5. The University Wits
6. Lyly and Hooker – The Translators, Pamphleteers and Critics

BOOK VI: LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE
1. Shakespeare
2. Shakespeare’s Comtemporaries in Drama
3. The Schools of Jacobean Poetry
4. Jacobean Prose – Secular
5. The Golden Age of the English Pulpit 

BOOK VII: CAROLINE LITERATURE
1. Blank Verse and the New Couplet
2. The Metaphysical – The Lyric Poets – The Miscellanists, etc.
3. The Drama Till the Closing of the Theatres
4. The Golden Age of the English Pulpit
5. Miscellaneous Prose
6. Scots Poetry and Prose

BOOK VIII: THE AUGUSTAN AGES
1. The Age of Dryden – Poetry
2. The Age of Dryden – Drama
3. The Age of Dryden – Prose
4. Queen Anne Prose
5. Pope and His Elder Contemporaries in Verse

BOOK IX: MIDDLE AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
1. The Poets from Thomson to Crabbe
2. The Eighteenth-Century Novel
3. Johnson, Goldsmith, and the Later Essayists
4. The Graver Prose
5. Eighteenth-Century Drama
6. Miscellaneous Writers

BOOK X: THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE
1. The Poets from Coleridge to Keats
2. The Novel – Scott and Miss Austen
3. The New Essay
4. The Last Georgian Prose
5. The Minor Poets of 1800-1830

BOOK XI: VICTORIAN LITERATURE
1. Tennyson and Browning
2. The Victorian Novel
3. History and Criticism
4. Poetry since the Middle of the Century
5. Miscellaneous