本书选取英国文学中的代表性经典作品，纵向上按照古英语文学、文艺复兴文学等进行大致的文学分期，横向上按作家作品介绍、选读注释、思考题和参考书目的体例进行编排。这样的安排和设计一方面是为了大致与国内高校英国文学课程的设置和教授相对应，另一方面也便于普通英语学习者阅读和赏析经典的英国文学文本。作家作品介绍和注释旨在呈现原汁原味的英文经典，使读者对经典英国文学作品有切身的体验；思考题和参考书目的设置则意在激发读者的进一步思考，并形成敏锐的跨文化意识，进而思索文化交流交融的可能图景和现实路径。

Part One Old and Middle English Period
1.Beowulf
Beowulf
2.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
3.Geoff rey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
4.Popular Ballads
Get up and Bar the Door
The Three Ravens
Sir Patrick Spens
Part Two The English Renaissance
5.Edmund Spenser
Sonnet 75
6.Christopher Marlowe
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
7.William Shakespeare
Sonnet 18
Hamlet
8.Francis Bacon
Of Studies
Part Three The Seventeenth Century
9.John Donne
Death, Be Not Proud
10.John Milton
To Mr.Cyriack Skinner Upon His Blindness
Areopagitica
11.John Bunyan
The Pilgrim's Progress
Part Four The Eighteenth Century
12.Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
13.Jonathan Swift
A Modest Proposal
14.Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson's Letter to Lord Chesterfi eld
15.Thomas Gray
The Epitaph
16.William Blake
Laughing Song
The Chimney Sweeper
The Chimney Sweeper
17.Robert Burns
A Man's a Man for A' That
Scots Wha Hae
A Red, Red Rose
Part Five The Romantic Period
18.William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Michael: A Pastoral Poem
19.George Gordon Byron
Sonnet on Chillon
She Walks in Beauty
20.Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to the West Wind
21.John Keats
On the Grasshopper and Cricket
To Autumn
22.Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
Part Six The Victorian Literature
23.Charles Dickens
David Copperfi eld
24.William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair
25.Matthew Arnold
Dover Beach
26.Charlotte Bront
Jane Eyre
27.Emily Bront
Wuthering Heights
28.Alfred Tennyson
Break, Break, Break
Crossing the Bar
29.Robert Browning
My Last Duchess
30.Oscar Wilde
The Happy Prince
31.Thomas Hardy
Afterwards
Jude the Obscure
Part Seven The Twentieth Century
32.William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
When You are Old
The Second Coming
33.John Galsworthy
Told by the Schoolmaster
34.D.H.Lawrence
The Rocking Horse Winner
35.James Joyce
Ulysses
36.William S.Maugham
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