Focusing on how writing both reflects and challenges the periods in which it is produced, John Peck and Martin Coyle combine close readings of key texts with recent critical thinking on the interaction of literary works and culture.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 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 Brontë
• 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 Butler, 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 The Twenty-First Century
• After 9/11
• The Novel: Looking Back
• The Novel: Looking Around
• The Novel: Looking Ahead
• Poetry
• Drama
• Periods of English Language and Literature
• Chronology
• Further Reading