本书反映了当代新的教学理念。为此，编委会也做出了大量努力。一方面，编写工作中强调协同性：在编写策划层面，出版社与编委会之间、编委会与编写者之间反复协商，制订计划，讨论样章；在使用者层面，充分考虑到师生之间以及学生之间的互动和协作。另一方面，教材致力于构建良好的英语学习平台，为学生的自主性学习、独立思考和创新思维创造条件，同时向作为教学各个环节的咨询者、组织者、监督者的教师提供指导。
- 前辅文
- 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 Postscript
- Periods of English Literature and Language
- Chronology
- Further Reading
