本书是根据《高等学校英语专业英语教学大纲》的课程设置而编写的。编者充分考虑到我国英语专业高年级学生的兴趣和爱好，简要介绍英国文学历史阶段的特点以及重要作家和作品。从早期英国文学到20世纪著名作家的著名作品中精选出影响大、流传广、并经过时间考验而脍炙人口的经典片段，引导学生从阅读原著入手，培养学生对文学作品的阅读、赏析能力，进而感受英国文学丰富的思想内涵和人文精神，并在此基础上提高学生的人文素质。
本书共分七章，每章由概述、作家简介、作品概要、原著选读、注释、赏析点评和思考题等部分组成。
- 目录
- 前辅文
- Chapter 1: Early and Medieval English Literature
- Chapter 2: English Literature of the Renaissance
- Francis Bacon
- William Shakespeare
- Ben Jonson
- Christopher Marlowe
- Chapter 3: English Literature during the English Bourgeois Revolution and the Restoration
- Chapter 4: Eighteenth Century English Literature
- Daniel Defoe
- Jonathan Swift
- Henry Fielding
- William Blake
- Robert Burns
- Chapter 5: English Literature of Early Nineteenth Century
- William Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- George Gordon Byron
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- John Keats
- Walter Scott
- Jane Austen
- Chapter 6: English Literature of the Mid-and-late-nineteenth Century
- William Makepeace Thackeray
- Charles Dickens
- Robert Browning
- Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë
- George Eliot
- Matthew Arnold
- Thomas Hardy
- Oscar Wilde
- Chapter 7: English Literature of the Twentieth Century before World War II
- George Bernard Shaw
- Joseph Conrad
- William Butler Yeats
- Virginia Woolf
- James Joyce
- DH Lawrence
- TS Eliot
- Works Cited
