Rev ed. of: The everyman history of English literature. 1985. Includes index.
Contents:
'Too much history'? 'Too many books'? Romance -- Chaucerian epic and romance -- Chaucer, Langland and the treachery of the text -- Two versions of pastoral: Arcady and Faeryland -- The Arcady of the poem -- The sonnet: history of a form -- Spenser's garden -- Miracles, moralities and Marlowe -- Shakespeare: tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy -- Shakespeare's after-life -- The tragedy and comedy of revenge -- Lyrical nothings -- Milton, 'author and end of all things' -- The lost paradise of the lyric -- Paradise Lost and its predestining -- Acting and being: comedy from Wycherley to Sheridan -- Swift, Pope and the goddess of unreason -- Inventing the novel: Defoe -- Richardson and Fielding: tragic pastoral and comic epic -- Sterne: tragedy, comedy, irony -- Johnson's lives and Boswell's life -- Gothic follies -- Wordsworth, Coleridge and the failed God -- Romantic surfeit -- Romantic deaths -- Imagination and fiction -- Dickens and the breeding of monsters -- The critical epic -- The novel's natural history -- "From romance to realism': Tennyson and Browning -- Decadence and nonsense -- The last romantic? -- Epic, romance and the novel -- The Waste Land and the Wastobe Land -- Babel rebuilt -- The stages of drama -- Symbols and secrets -- 'Now and in England' -- 'Too much history'? 'Too many books'?
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