Classics of British Literature

*[1] Anglo-Saxon roots, pessimism and comradeship [2] Chaucer, social diversity [3] Chaucer, a man of unusual cultivation [4] Spenser, The faerie Queene [5] Early drama, low comedy and religion [6] Marlowe, controversy and danger [7] Shakespeare the man, the road to the Globe [8] Shakespeare, the mature years [9] Shakespeare's rivals, Jonson and Webster [10] The King James Bible, English most elegant [11] The Metaphysicals, conceptual daring [12] Paradise lost, a new language for poetry [13] Turmoil makes for good literature [14] The Augustans, order, decorum, and wit [15] Swift, anger and satire [16] Johnson, bringing order to the language [17] Defoe, Crusoe and the rise of capitalism [18] Behn, emancipation in the restoration [19] The golden age of fiction [20] Gibbon, window into 18th-century England [21] Equiano, the inhumanity of slavery [22] Women poets, the minor voice [23] Wollstonecraft, 'First of a new genus' [24] Blake, mythic universes and poetry [25] Scott and Burns, the voices of Scotland [26] Lyrical ballads, collaborative creation [27] Mad, bad Byron [28] Keats, literary gold [29] Frankenstein, a Gothic masterpiece [30] Miss Austen and Mrs] Radcliffe [31] Pride and Prejudice, moral fiction [32] Dickens, writer with a mission [33] The 1840s, growth of the realistic novel [34] Wuthering Heights, Emily's masterwork [35] Jane Eyre and the other Brontë [36] Voices of Victorian poetry [37] Eliot, fiction and moral reflection [38] Hardy, life at its worst [39] The British bestseller, an overview [40] Heart of Darkness, heart of the empire? [41] Wilde, celebrity author [42] Shaw and Pygmalion [43] Joyce and Yeats, giants of Irish literature [44] Great War, great poetry [45] Bloomsbury and the Bloomsberries [46] 20th-Century English poetry, two traditions [47] British fiction from James to Rushdie [48] New theatre, new literary worlds