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人手，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。

Chapter 1:Early and Medieval English Literature
Geoffrey Chaucer
Chapter 2:English Literature of the Renaissance
Francis Bacon
William Shakespeare
Ben Joon
Christopher Marlowe
Chapter 3:English Literature during the English BourgeoisRevolution and the Restoration
John Milton
John Bunyan
Chapter 4:Eighteenth Century English Literature
Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift
Henry Fielding
William Blake
Robert Bur
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 theMid-and-late-nineteenthCentury
William Makepeace Thackeray
Charles Dicke
Robert Browning
Charlotte Bronte and EmilyBronte
George Eliot
Matthew Arnold
Thomas Hardy
Oscar Wilde
Chapter 7:English Literature of the Twentieth Century beforeWorldWar II
George Bernard Shaw
Joseph Conrad
William Butler Yeats
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
D. H. Lawrence
T. S. Eliot
Works Cited