This popular introduction and course companion to literary studies for A level and degree students is revised in a major new edition. New features in the third edition include completely new chapters on gothic and war literature, new sections on Swift, Dryden, Matthew Arnold and Kipling and an account of the impact of new critical theory on all major authors.

1. Study and examination techniques in English literature 2. Revision, project work and research techniques 3. A guide to basic literary terms 4. Practical criticism: poetry 5. Practical criticism: prose 6. Practical criticism: drama 7. Chaucer 8. Elizabethan and Jacobean drama 9. Shakespeare 10. The Metaphysical Poets 11. Milton 12. Restoration drama 13. Pope, Dryden and Swift: Classicism and the eighteenth century 14. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century novel: Defoe, Fielding, Austen and the Brontes 15. Romanticism and the Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats 16. Gothic 17. Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot 18. Victorian poets: Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Arnold and Hardy 19. Victorian drama: Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw and Wilde 20. War literature 21. Modern and contemporary poetry 22. The modern and contemporary novel 23. Modern and contemporary drama 24. American literature 25. Literary and critical theory