Book Cover -- Title -- Contents -- Preface -- Preface to the edition of 1984 -- The fourteenth century -- Fifteenth-century poetry and prose -- The early sixteenth century -- Elizabethan drama -- Jacobean drama -- Elizabethan poetry -- Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry -- Elizabethan and seventeenth-century prose -- Milton to Dryden -- Restoration drama -- Origins of the novel -- The age of Swift and Pope -- The age of Johnson -- The eighteenth-century novel -- The close of the eighteenth century -- Wordsworth and the Romantics -- Scott and contemporary novelists -- Victorian poetry -- The Victorian novel -- Twentieth-century drama -- Twentieth-century poetry -- The twentieth-century novel -- Chronological table of writers -- Bibliography -- Index.