《英美文学史及精要选读》由张丽娟、张艳波、张丽娟所著，首先，教材的编写以文学史为框架，框架结构清楚明了。既囊括了经典作家，也涵盖了对20世纪作家的讲解与评论，较之很多教材更具有时代感，更方便学生的日常学习及研究生考试入学备考。

其次，每个篇章包括了以下这些部分：作家介绍、作品介绍、选段精选、问题思考及参考答案。在作家介绍部分，我们挑选了与其创作关系紧密的作家主要经历；作品介绍以作家主要作品和评论家关注最多的作品为主；故事情节介绍少而精，便于学习者分析时使用；而选段选读的原则是选经典段落，篇幅适中。此外，以前的很多教材都设有思考问题，但提供参考答案的较少。对于三本或专科学生而言，参考答案的提供无疑降低了他们学习的难度，便于他们对文学课程的学习保持兴趣。

最后，本书末尾对主要文学术语及文学批评理论进行了简单扼要的总结，这样更便于学习者使用。

前言

       Part Ⅰ.English Literature

Chapter 1. The Anglo -Saxon Period

1. Historical Background / 3

2. Introduction to Beowulf / 4

Chapter 2. The Anglo - Norman Period

1. Historical Background / 6

2. Romances / 7

3. Introduction to Sir Gaiwain and the Green Knight / 7

Chapter 3. Geoffrey Chaucer

1. Geoffrey Chaucer / 10

2. Introduction to The Canterbury Tales / 12

Chapter 4. The Fifteenth- Century Popular Ballad

Chapter 5. The Sixteenth - Century English Literature

1. Historical Background / 17

2. Renaissance and Humanism / 19

3. The Sixteenth -Century Poetry and Edmund Spenser / 20

4. The Sixteenth - Century Drama and Christopher Marlowe / 23

5. William Shakespeare / 27

5. Francis Bacon / 43

7. The Sixteenth - Century Prose and Thomas More / 46

Chapter 6. The Seventeenth - Century English Literature

1. Historical Background / 53

2. Literary Features / 55

3. John Milton / 56

4. John Bunyan / 64

5. John Donne / 66

6. John Dryden / 69

Chapter 7. The Age of Enlightenment

1. Historical Background / 76

2. Literary Background / 76

3. Enlightenment / 77

4. Alexander Pope / 77

5. Daniel Defoe / 78

6. Jonathan Swift / 80

7. Samuel Johnson / 82

8. Henry Fielding / 83

9. Thomas Gray / 84

10. Oliver Goldsmith / 85

11. Richard Brinsley Sheridan / 86

12. William Blake / 87

13. Robert Bums / 91

14. Samuel Richardson / 94

Chapter 8. The Romantic English Literature

1. Historical Background / 98

2. Romanticism / 99

3. Literary Achievements / 102

4. William Wordsworth / 102

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge / 108

6. George Gordon Byron / 112

7. Percy Bysshe Shelley / 116

8. John Keats / 120

9. Jane Austen / 124

10. Walter Scott / 127

Chapter 9. The Victorian Age

1. Historical Background / 137

2. Literary Features of the Victorian Age / 138

3. Realism / 138

4. Charles Dickens / 139

5. William Makepeace Thackeray / 144

6. George Eliot / 148

7. The Bronte Sisters / 155

8. Robert Stevenson / 168

9. Alfred Tennyson / 173

10. Robert Browning / 176

Chapter 10. The Twentieth Century English Literature

1. Historical Background / 182

2. Modernism / 183

3. Thomas Hardy / 184

4. Oscar Wilde / 191

5. George Bernard Shaw / 195

6. William Butler Yeats / 200

7. John Galsworthy / 205

8. J. Joyce / 209

9. Virginia Woolf / 214

10. D. H. Lawrence / 218

11.T.S. Eliot / 222

12. George Orwell / 223

13. SamuelBeckett / 228

14. Doris Lessing / 234

      Part Ⅱ American Literature

Chapter 11. The Period of Colonialism

 1. Historical Background / 243

 2. Puritanism / 243

 3. John Smith / 244

 4. Other Writers in this Period / 244

Chapter 12. The Period of Reason and Revolution

 1. Historical Background / 245

 2. Enlightenment / 245

 3. Benjamin Franklin / 246

 4. Thomas Paine / 246

 5. Thomas Jefferson / 247

 6. Philip Freneau / 247

Chapter 13. The Period of Romanticism

 1. Historical Background / 249

 2. Romanticism / 249

 3. Washington Irving / 250

 4. James Fennimore Cooper / 251

 5. William Cullen Bryant / 252

 6. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow / 253

 7. Nathaniel Hawthorne / 255

 8. Herman Melville / 258

 9. Edgar Allan Poe / 259

 10. Walt Whitman / 261

 11. Emily Dickinson / 262

 12. Transcendentalism / 265

 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson / 266

 14. Henry David Thoreau / 267

Chapter 14. The Period of Realism

1. Historical Background / 270

2. Local Colorism / 270

3. Realism / 271

4. Mark Twain / 271

5. Henry James / 273

6. William Dean Howells / 275

7. O. Henry / 275

8. Sherwood Anderson / 276

9. Naturalism / 276

10. Stephen Crane / 277

11. Frank Norris / 277

12. Jack London / 278

13. Theodore Dreiser / 280

Chapter 15. The Twentieth- century American Literature

1. Historical Background / 283

2. Modernism / 283

3. Poets of the 1920s / 284

4. Novelists of the 1920s / 296

5. Novelists of the 1930s / 307

6. Dramatists of the 20th century / 309

7. Novelists after World War II / 314

8. Black Writers of the 20th Century / 327

9. Chinese American Writers / 336

 10. Poets after World War Ⅱ / 337

Keys to the Exercises

References

Appendix

Index