From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf

Introduction Page
1. Ballads and Moor Monsters
   1. Yes, It Is English
   2. Beowulf
   3. Geoffrey Chaucer
   4. The Canterbury Tales
   5. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
   6. Ballads
   7. Sir Thomas Malory's The Death of Arthur
   8. Medieval Attitudes Toward Life
   9. Workshop: Alliteration
2. Renaissance, Reason, and Order
   1. Sir Thomas More's Utopia
   2. The Italian Sonnet Meets English Talent
   3. The Faerie Queene
   4. Elizabeth I, Queen Who Shaped an Age
   5. From Pen to Printing Press
   6. Shakespeare's Sisters
   7. "The Vulgar Tongue" -- English Translations of the Bible
   8. Morality Plays, Interludes, and the Emergence of Mature Drama
   9. Workshop: The Sonnet
3. Metaphysics and the Rising Middle Class: The 17th Century
   1. To Make a Point: Prose Without Frills
   2. John Donne and the Metaphysical Conceit
   3. The Metaphysical Poets
   4. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
   5. John Milton
   6. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent -- Milton's Paradise Lost
   7. Aphra Behn -- The First Woman to Make a Living Writing
   8. Workshop: Rhythm and Meter
4. Satire, Sitcoms, Newspapers and Novels
   1. Satire: Dryden, Pope and Swift
   2. Comedy of Manners -- Stage Sitcoms
   3. Grub Street -- The First Newspapers
   4. Clarissa and Robinson Crusoe: The Novel Emerges
   5. The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
   6. Mary Wollstonecraft
   7. Poetry Workshop: The Heroic Couplet
5. Political and Social Revolution
   1. Robert Burns
   2. William Blake
   3. Blake's London
   4. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
   5. Workshop: Rhyme
6. The Romantic Poets
   1. William Wordsworth, Poetic Revolutionary
   2. Ode on Intimations of Immortality
   3. Lyrical Ballads by Coleridge and Wordsworth
   4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
   5. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
   6. Kubla Khan
   7. Lord Byron -- Cosmic Self-assertion
   8. Percy Bysshe Shelley -- Meek and Bold
   9. The Short Life of John Keats
   10. Ode on a Grecian Urn
   11. Workshop: The Sestina
7. Reform and Earnestness
   1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
   2. The Brownings
   3. The Rossettis
   4. Gerard Manley Hopkins
   5. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll
   6. Workshop: Metaphor and Simile
8. Victorian Novelists
   1. The Brontë Family
   2. Wuthering Heights
   3. Jane Eyre
   4. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Emma
   5. George Eliot
   6. Silas Marner and Middlemarch
   7. Charles Dickens
   8. A Tale of Two Cities
   9. David Copperfield
9. Victorian Heroes and Heroines
   1. Dickens's Pip: Great Expectations
   2. Heathcliff and Rochester
   3. Foundlings: Oliver and Emily
   4. Two Austen Heroines: Emma and Elizabeth
10. Into the 20th century
    1. End of the Century Essayists
    2. Oscar Wilde
    3. Thomas Hardy -- The Last Victorian?
    4. Virginia Woolf