A critical history of English literature.
v. 1. Anglo-saxon literature -- The development of Middle English prose and verse -- Middle English literature: fabliau, lyruc dream allegory, ballad -- Chaucer, Gower, Piers Plowman -- The end of the Middle Ages -- The early Tudor scene -- Spenser and his time -- Drama from the miracle plays to Marlowe -- Shakespeare -- Drama from Jonson to the closing of the theaters -- Poetry after Spenser: the Jonsonian and metaphysical traditions -- Milton -- Prose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Scottish literature to 1700. v. 2. The restoration: drama; Dryden -- The Augustan age: Defoe, Swift, Pope -- Poetry from Thomson to Crabbe -- The novel from Richardson to Jane Austen -- Eighteenth-century philosophical, historical, and critical prose, and miscellaneous writing -- Scottish literature from Allan Ramsay to Walter Scott -- The romantic poets I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge -- The romantic poets II: Shelley, Keats, and Byron -- Familiar, critical, and miscellaneous prose of the early and middle nineteenth century -- Victorian prose: John Henry Newman and William Morris -- The Victorian poets -- The Victorian novel -- Drama from the beginning of the eighteenth century -- Twentieth century poetry -- The twentieth-century novel.