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| List of Illustrations | |
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| Acknowledgements | |
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| Preface | |
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| Preface to Second Edition | |
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| Abbreviations | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Literary history | |
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| What's included? | |
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| Tradition, not 'canon' | |
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| Priorities | |
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| What is literature? | |
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| Language change | |
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| Other literatures in English | |
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| Is drama literature? | |
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| Qualities and quantities | |
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| Texts | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Primary texts | |
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| Secondary texts | |
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| Medieval | |
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| Old English Literature? to 1100 | |
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| Orientations | |
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| Britain, England, English | |
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| Oral origins and conversion | |
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| Aldhelm, Bede, Caedmon | |
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| Northumbria and The Dream of the Rood | |
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| Heroic poetry | |
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| Christian literature | |
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| Alfred | |
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| Beowulf | |
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| Elegies | |
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| Battle poetry | |
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| The harvest of literacy | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Middle English Literature: 1066-1500 | |
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| The new writing | |
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| Handwriting and printing | |
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| The impact of French | |
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| Scribal practic | |
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| Dialect and language change | |
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| Literary consciousness | |
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| New fashions: French and Latin | |
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| Epic and romance | |
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| Courtly literature | |
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| Medieval institutions | |
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| Authority | |
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| Lyrics | |
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| English prose | |
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| The fourteenth century | |
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| Spiritual writing | |
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| Julian of Norwich | |
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| Secular prose | |
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| Ricardian poetry | |
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| Piers Plowman | |
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| Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | |
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| John Gower | |
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| Geoffrey Chaucer | |
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| The Parlement of Fowls | |
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| Troilus and Criseyde | |
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| The Canterbury Tales | |
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| The fifteenth century | |
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| Drama | |
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| Mystery plays | |
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| Morality plays | |
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| Religious lyric | |
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| Deaths of Arthur | |
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| The arrival of printing | |
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| Scottish poetry | |
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| Robert Henryson | |
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| William Dunbar | |
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| Gavin Douglas | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Tudor and Stuart | |
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| Tudor Literature; 1500-1603 | |
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| Medieval and Modern: a caution | |
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| Renaissance and Reformation | |
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| The Renaissance | |
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| Expectations | |
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| Investigations | |
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| England's place in the world | |
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| The Reformation | |
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| Sir Thomas More | |
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| The Courtier | |
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| Sir Thomas Wyatt | |
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| The Earl of Surrey | |
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| Religious prose | |
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| Bible translation | |
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| Instructive prose | |
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| Drama | |
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| Elizabethan literature | |
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| Verse | |
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| Sir Philip Sidney | |
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| Edmund Spenser | |
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| Sir Walter Ralegh | |
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| Elizabethan and Jacobean | |
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| Christopher Marlowe | |
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| Song | |
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| Thomas Campion | |
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| Prose | |
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| John Lyly | |
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| Thomas Nashe | |
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| Richard Hooker | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Shakespeare and the Drama | |
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| William Shakespeare | |
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| Shakespeare's life | |
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| The plays preserved | |
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| Luck and fame | |
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| The drama | |
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| The commercial theatre | |
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| Predecessors | |
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| Christopher Marlowe | |
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| The order of the plays | |
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| Histories | |
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| Richard II | |
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| Henry IV | |
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| Henry V | |
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| Comedy | |
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| A Midsummer Night's Dream | |
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| Twelfth Night | |
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| The poems | |
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| Tragedy | |
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| Hamlet | |
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| KingLear | |
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| Macbeth | |
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| Romances | |
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| The Tempest | |
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| Conclusion | |
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| Shakespeare's achievement | |
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| His supposed point of view | |
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| Ben Jonson | |
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| The Alchemist | |
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| Volpone | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Stuart Literature: to 1700 | |
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| The Stuart century | |
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| Drama to 1642 | |
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| Comedy | |
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| Tragedy | |
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| John Donne | |
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| Prose to 1642 | |
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| Sir Francis Bacon | |
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| Lancelot Andrewes | |
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| Robert Burton | |
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| Sir Thomas Browne | |
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| Poetry to Milton | |
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| Ben Jonson | |
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| Metaphysical poets | |
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| Devotional poets | |
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| Cavalier poets | |
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| John Milton | |
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| Prose and Paradise Lost | |
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| The Restoration | |
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| The Earl of Rochester | |
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| John Bunyan | |
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| Samuel Pepys | |
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| The theatres | |
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| Restoration comedy | |
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| John Dryden | |
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| Satire | |
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| Prose | |
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| John Locke | |
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| Women writers | |
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| William Congreve | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Augustan and Romantic | |
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| Augustan Literature: to 1790 | |
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| The eighteenth century | |
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| The Enlightenment | |
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| Sense and Sensibility | |
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| Alexander Pope and 18th-century civilization | |
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| Joseph Addison | |
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| Jonathan Swift | |
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| Alexander Pope | |
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| Translation as tradition | |
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| The Rape of the Lock | |
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| Mature verse | |
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| John Gay | |
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| Lady Mary Wortley Montagu | |
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| The novel | |
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| Daniel Defoe | |
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| Cross-currents | |
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| Samuel Richardson | |
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| Henry Fielding | |
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| Tobias Smollett | |
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| Laurence Sterne | |
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| The emergence of Sensibility | |
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| Thomas Gray | |
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| Pre-Romantic sensibility: 'Ossian' | |
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| Gothic fiction | |
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| The Age of Johnson | |
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| Dr Samuel Johnson | |
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| The Dictionary | |
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| Literary criticism | |
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| James Boswell | |
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| Non-fiction | |
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| Edward Gibbon | |
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| Edmund Burke | |
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| Oliver Goldsmith | |
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| Frances Burney | |
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| Richard Brinsley Sheridan | |
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| Christopher Smart | |
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| William Cowper | |
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| Robert Burns | |
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| Further reading | |
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| The Romantics: 1790-1837 | |
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| The Romantic poets | |
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| Early Romantics | |
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| William Blake | |
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| Subjectivity | |
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| Romanticism and Revolution | |
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| William Wordsworth | |
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| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | |
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| Sir Walter Scott | |
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| Younger Romantics | |
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| Lord Byron | |
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| Percy Bysshe Shelley | |
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| John Keats | |
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| Romantic prose | |
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| Belles lettres | |
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| Charles Lamb | |
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| William Hazlitt | |
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| Thomas De Quincey | |
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| Fiction | |
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| Thomas Love Peacock | |
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| Mary Shelley | |
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| Maria Edgeworth | |
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| Sir Walter Scott | |
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| Jane Austen | |
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| Towards Victoria | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Victorian Literature to 1880 | |
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| The Age and its Sages | |
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| The Victorian age | |
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| Moral history | |
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| Abundance | |
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| Why sages? | |
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| Thomas Carlyle | |
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| John Stuart Mill | |
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| John Ruskin | |
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| John Henry Newman | |
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| Charles Darwin | |
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| Matthew Arnold | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Poetry | |
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| Victorian Romantic poetry | |
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| Minor verse | |
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| John Clare | |
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| Alfred Tennyson | |
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| Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning | |
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| Matthew Arnold | |
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| Arthur Hugh Clough | |
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti | |
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| Algernon Charles Swinburne | |
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| Gerard Hopkins | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Fiction | |
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| The triumph of the novel | |
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| Disraeli's Sybil; or, The Two Nations | |
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| Two Bronte novels | |
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| Jane Eyre | |
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| Wuthering Heights | |
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| Elizabeth Gaskell | |
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| Charles Dickens | |
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| The Pickwick Papers | |
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| David Copperfield | |
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| Bleak House | |
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| Our Mutual Friend | |
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| Great Expectations | |
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| 'The Inimitable' | |
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| William Makepeace Thackeray | |
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| Vanity Fair | |
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| Anthony Trollope | |
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| George Eliot | |
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| Adam Bede | |
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| The Mill on the Floss | |
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| Silas Marner | |
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| Middlemarch | |
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| Daniel Deronda | |
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| Nonsense prose and verse | |
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| Lewis Carroll | |
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| Edward Lear | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Late Victorian Literature: 1880-1900 | |
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| Differentiation | |
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| Thomas Hardy and Henry James | |
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| Aestheticism | |
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| Walter Pater | |
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| A revival of drama | |
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| Oscar Wilde | |
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| George Bernard Shaw | |
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| Fiction | |
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| Thomas Hardy | |
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| Tess of the d'Urbervilles | |
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| Minor fiction | |
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| Samuel Butler | |
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| Robert Louis Stevenson | |
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| Wilkie Collins | |
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| George Moore | |
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| Poetry | |
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| Aestheticism | |
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| A. E. Housman | |
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| Rudyard Kipling | |
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| Further reading | |
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| The Twentieth Century | |
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| Ends and Beginnings: 1901-19 | |
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| The new century | |
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| Fiction | |
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| Edwardian realists | |
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| Rudyard Kipling | |
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| John Galsworthy | |
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| Arnold Bennett | |
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| H. G. Wells | |
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| The Press and G. K. Chesterton | |
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| Joseph Conrad | |
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| Heart of Darkness | |
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| Nostromo | |
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| E. M. Forster | |
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| Ford Madox Ford | |
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| Poetry | |
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| Pre-war verse | |
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| Thomas Hardy | |
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| War poetry and war poets | |
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| Further reading | |
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| From Post-War to Post-War: 1920-55 | |
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| 'Modernism': 1914-27 | |
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| D. H. Lawrence | |
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| The Rainbow | |
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| James Joyce | |
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| Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | |
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| Ulysses | |
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| Ezra Pound: the London years | |
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| T. S. Eliot | |
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| The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | |
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| The Waste Land | |
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| Four Quartets | |
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| Eliot's criticism | |
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| W. B. Yeats | |
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| Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones | |
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| Virginia Woolf | |
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| To the Lighthouse | |
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| Katherine Mansfield | |
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| Non-modernism: the Twenties and Thirties | |
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| Modernism fails to catch on | |
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| The poetry of the Thirties | |
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| Political camps | |
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| W. H. Auden | |
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| The novel | |
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| Evelyn Waugh | |
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| Grahame Greene | |
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| Anthony Powell | |
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| George Orwell | |
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| Elizabeth Bowen | |
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| Fairy tales | |
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| C. S. Lewis | |
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| J. R. R. Tolkien | |
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| Poetry | |
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| The Second World War | |
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| Dylan Thomas | |
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| Drama | |
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| Sean O'Casey | |
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| Farther reading | |
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| New Beginnings: 1955-80 | |
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| Drama | |
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| Samuel Beckett | |
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| John Osborne | |
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| Harold Pinter | |
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| Established protest | |
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| Novels galore | |
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| William Golding | |
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| Muriel Spark | |
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| Iris Murdoch | |
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| Other writers | |
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| Poetry | |
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| Philip Larkin | |
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| Ted Hughes | |
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| Geoffrey Hill | |
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| Tony Harrison | |
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| Seamus Heaney | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Postscript on the Current | |
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| Internationalization and language | |
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| Post-modernism? | |
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| Even more novels | |
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| Metropolitan novelists | |
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| Genre | |
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| Post-colonial? Multi-cultural? | |
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| Multi-culturalism | |
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| Four novels | |
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| Contemporary poetry | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Index | |