Chapter 1The Old and Medieval Period1
1.1An Introduction1
1.2Geoffrey Chaucer2
1.3Folk Ballads8
Chapter 2The Renaissance Period14
2.1An Introduction14
2.2Edmund Spenser17
2.3Christopher Marlowe21
2.4Walter Raleigh29
2.5William Shakespeare31
2.6Francis Bacon43
2.7John Donne45
2.8George Herbert49
2.9Andrew Marvell51
2.10Ben Jonson53
2.11Robert Herrick55
2.12John Milton57
Chapter 3The Neoclassical Period65
3.1An Introduction65
3.2John Dryden67
3.3John Bunyan70
3.4Jonathan Swift75
3.5Alexander Pope82
3.6Daniel Defoe87
3.7Henry Fielding92
3.8Samuel Johnson98
3.9Thomas Gray101
3.10Robert Burns105
3.11William Blake107
3.12Richard Brinsley Sheridan111
Chapter 4The Romantic Period123
4.1An Introduction123
4.2William Wordsworth126
4.3Samuel Taylor Coleridge130
4.4George Gordon Byron133
4.5Percy Bysshe Shelley137
4.6John Keats144
4.7Jane Austen149
Chapter 5The Victorian Period156
5.1An Introduction156
5.2Charles Dickens158
5.3Alfred Tennyson166
5.4Robert Browning170
5.5Elizabeth Barrett Browning176
5.6Charlotte Bront178
5.7Emily Bront187
5.8Matthew Arnold196
5.9Gerard Manley Hopkins199
5.10Thomas Hardy201
Chapter 6The Modern Period211
6.1An Introduction211
6.2George Bernard Shaw216
6.3Alfred Edward Housman224
6.4John Galsworthy226
6.5William Butler Yeats234
6.6T. S. Eliot238
6.7James Joyce247
6.8D. H. Lawrence254
6.9William Golding261
6.10Samuel Beckett266
6.11Dylan Thomas276
6.12Ted Hughes278
6.13Seamus Heaney280
Appendix ⅠSample Test Paper283
Appendix ⅡA Brief Introduction to the Study of Literature291
Acknowledgments315