This book intends to give the students and readers a general knowledge of the development of British literature since Anglo-Saxon period to the present day and a critical examination of the representative works of major English literary men and women. I call this book A History of British Literature instead of English Literature because it includes the literature of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as well as of England. It was in 1920 that Ireland became partitioned from the United Kingdom when the southern twenty-six counties seceded from the country.

The Anglo-Saxon Period 449-1066

 Introduction

　The Venerable Bede and Caedmon

　King Alfred the Great

　Beowulf

　The Exeter Book

The Medieval Period 1066-1485

　Introduction

　Medieval Romance

　Folk Ballads

　John Wycliffe and William Langland

　Drama in the Middle Ages

　Geoffrey Chaucer

The Elizabethan Age 1485-1625

　Introduction

　Thomas More

　Sir Philip Sidney

　Edmund Spenser

　Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh

　Minor Playwrights

　William Shakespeare

　Francis Bacon

　King James Bible

The Seventeenth Century 1625-1700

　Introdution

　Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets

　John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets

　John Milton

　John Bunyan

　John Dryden

The Age of Neo-Classicism 1700-1764

　Introduction

　Alexander Pope

　Jonathan Swift

　Richard Steele and Joseph Addison

　Samuel Johnson and James Boswell

　The Novel of the Eighteenth Century

　Daniel Defoe

　Samuel Richardson

　Henry Fielding

　Tobias Smollett

　Laurence Sterne

　Oliver Goldsmith

Pre-Romantic Period 1764-1798

　Introduction

　Horace Walpole

　Ann Radcliffe

　Thomas Gray

　Robert Burns

　William Blake

The Romantic Age 1798-1837

　Introduction

　William Wordsworth

　Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 George Gordon Lord Byron

 Percy Bysshe Shelley

 John Keats

 William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb

 Mary Shelley

 Sir Walter Scott

 Jane Austen

The Victorian Age 1837-1901

 Introdution

 Alfred Tennyson

 Robert Browning

 Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 Charles Dickens

 William Makepeace Thackeray

 Matthew Arnold

 The Bronte Sisters

 Thomas Hardy

 Oscar Wilde

The Modernist Age 1901-1945

 Introdution

 William Butler Yeats

 T.S.Eliot

 W.H.Auden

 Joseph Conrad

 James Joyce

The Postmodem Period 1945-Present

 Introduction

 Samuel Beckett

 Harold Pinter

 William Golding

 Doris Lessing

Bibliography

Index