ABSTRACT

First published in 2012. This work of introduction is designed to escort the reader through some six centuries of English literature. It begins in the fourteenth century at the point at which the language written in our country is recognizably our own, and ends in the 1950s. It is a compact survey, summing up the substance and quality of the individual achievements that make up our literature. The aim is to leave the reader informed about each writer’s main output, sensitive to the special character of his gifts, and aware of his place in the story of our literature as a whole.

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