John Peck and Martin Coyle编著的《英国文学简史》记述了从古英语时期至21世纪初一千多年间英国文学的发展演变，将文本置于社会、政治和文化语境之中，兼顾经典和非经典作品，视角新颖，评论中肯，信息比较完备，可读性强，无论是对英语专业的学生和教师还是对普通读者来说，都是一本值得阅读或收藏的文学史书。

《英国文学简史》全书共15章，加上关于21世纪的“补述”，比较全面系统地介绍了英国诗歌、戏剧、小说、散文等各种文学体裁的发轫和成熟。各章内容安排得当，对主要作家、主要作品进行较为深入的分析评论，叙述收放有度，主次分明。

《英国文学简史》篇幅适中，语言简练，可以作为优质教学内容，配合英国文学选读教材使用。

1 Old English Literature

 Beowulf

 'The Seafarer' and 'The Wanderer'

 Battle Poems and 'The Dream of the Rood'

 Old English Language

2 Middle English Literature

 From the Norman Conquest to Chaucer

 Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

 Geoffrey Chaucer, William Dunbar, Robert Henryson

 William Langland, Medieval Drama, Thomas Malory

3 Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose

 Sir Thomas Wyatt

 Sixteenth-Century Prose and the Reformation

 The Sonnet: Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare

 Edmund Spenser

4 Shakespeare

 Shakespeare in Context

 Shakespeare's Comedies and Histories

 Shakespeare's Tragedies

 Shakespeare's Late Plays

5 Renaissance and Restoration Drama

 Renaissance Drama and Christopher Marlowe

 Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy

 Ben Jonson and the Masque

 Restoration Drama

6 Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Prose

 John Donne

 From Ben Jonson to John Bunyan and Andrew Marvell

 John Milton

 John Dryden

7 The Eighteenth Century

 Alexander Pope

 The Augustan Age

 Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson

 Sensibility

8 The Novel: The First Hundred Years

 Daniel Defoe

 Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett

 From Eliza Haywood to Mary Shelley

 Walter Scott and Jane Austen

9 The Romantic Period

 The Age of Revolution

 William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor

 Coleridge

 Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats

 Radical Voices

10 Victorian Literature, 1837-1857

 Charles Dickens

 Charlotte and Emily Bronte

 William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell

 Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

11 Victorian Literature, 1857-1876

 Victorian Thinkers

 George Eliot

 Wilkie Collins'and the Sensation Novel

 Anthony Trollope, Christina Rossetti

12 Victorian Literature, 1876-1901

 Thomas Hardy

 George Gissing, George Moore, Samuel Buder, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson

 Rudyard Kipling

 George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Late Victorian Poetry

13 The Twentieth Century: The Early Years

 Joseph Conrad

 Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield

 D. H. Lawrence

 Georgian Poetry, War Poetry, W. B. Yeats

14 The Twentieth Century: Between the Wars

 T. S. Eliot

 James Joyce

 Virginia Woolf

 The 1930s

15 The Twentieth Century: The Second World War to the End of the Millennium

 Wartime and Post-War Britain

 Drama

 Novels

 Poetry

16 Postscript

 The Twenty-First Century

Periods of English Literature and Language

Chronology

Further Reading