From the Book - Eighth edition.
The Middle Ages (to ca. 1485)
Anglo-Saxon literature. The dream of the rood ; Beowulf.
Anglo-Norman literature. Marie De France.
Middle English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sir Gawain and the green knight ; Geoffrey Chaucer ; William Langland ; Julian of Norwich ; Margery Kempe ; The York play of the crucifixion ; Sir Thomas Malory.
The sixteenth century (1485-1603) Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder ; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ; The English BIble ; Elizabeth I ; Edmund Spenser ; Sir Walter Ralegh ; Sir Philip Sidney ; Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke ; Christopher Marlowe ; William Shakespeare ; Thomas Nashe.
The early seventeenth century (1603-1660) John Donne ; Amelia Lanyer ; Ben Jonson ; Mary Wroth ; Thomas Hobbes ; George Herbert ; Robert Herrick ; Richard Lovelace ; Katherine Philips ; Andrew Marvell ; Margaret Cavendish ; John Milton.
The Restoration and the eighteenth century (1660-1785) John Dryden ; John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester ; Aphra Behn ; Jonathan Swift ; Alexander Pope ; Eliza Haywood ; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ; William Hogarth ; Samuel Johnson ; James Boswell ; Thomas Gray ; William Collins ; William Cowper ; Olaudah Equiano ; Frances Burney.
The Romantic period (1785-1830) Anna Letitia Barbauld ; Charlotte Smith ; William Blake ; Robert Burns ; Mary Wollstonecraft ; William Wordsworth ; Dorothy Wordsworth ; Samuel Taylor Coleridge ; George Gordon, Lord Byron ; Percy Bysshe Shelley ; Felicia Dorothea Hemans ; John Keats.
The Victorian Age (1830-1901) Thomas Carlyle ; Elizabeth Barrett Browning ; Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; Elizabeth Gaskell ; Robert Browning ; Matthew Arnold ; Christina Rossetti ; Gerard Manley Hopkins ; Robert Louis Stevenson ; Oscar Wilde ; Rudyard Kipling.
The twentieth century and after. Thomas Hardy ; Joseph Conrad ; William Butler Yeats ; Virginia Woolf ; James Joyce ; D.H. Lawrence ; T.S. Eliot ; Katherine Mansfield ; Jean Rhys ; Samuel Beckett ; W.H. Auden ; Dylan Thomas ; Philip Larkin ; Nadine Gordimer ; Brian Friel ; Derek Walcott ; Alice Munro ; Seamus Heaney ; J.M. Coetzee ; Salman Rushdie ; Anne Carson ; Poems in process.
Appendixes: Literary terminology ; Geographic nomenclature ; British money ; The British Baronage ; The royal lines of England and Great Britain ; Religions in England ; Map: London from Chaucer to Johnson ; Map: London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ; Map: The British Empire, ca. 1913 ; Illustration: The universe according to Ptolemy ; Illustration: A London playhouse of Shakespeare's time.