本书为编者多年讲授该门课程的成果，在我国多所高校执教多年的美国Linell Davis教授及Michael True教授均对本书给予高度评价，认为是中国学生学习英美文学的优秀教材。

本版和将来的新版将坚持“少而精”的编选原则。在同类教材中这可能是分量适中、较为精简的一种。这主要是考虑到英语专业毕业生的就业面十分宽广，需要开设许多新课程，本门课程的课时受到很大限制。全国现有约700个英语专业，许多学校本科仅安排80课时(英国文学选读40课时，美国文学选读40课时)。有些学校则安排课时较多。本书主要为80课时设计(也可供较多课时使用)，多余的篇目可作课外阅读材料或供以后阅读。

           ENGLISH LITERATURE

1 William Shakespeare

  Sonnet 18

  The Merchant of Venice (Act IV, Scene 1)

2 John Milton

  To Cyriack Skinner

  Paradise Lost (excerpt from Book IV)

3 Daniel Defoe

  Robinson Crusoe (Chapters VII, VIII & IX)

4 Jonathan Swift

  Gulliver's Travels (Part IV, Chapters VI & VIII)

5 Henry Fielding

  Joseph Andrews (Chapter XII)

6 Robert Burns

  A Red, Red Rose

  On the Seas and Far Away

  Two Satirical Epigrams

7 William Blake

  On Another's Sorrow

  Love's Secret

  London

  I Heard an Angel Singing

8 William Wordsworth

  She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

  The Solitary Reaper

  Composed upon Westminster Bridge

9 Jane Austen

  Pride and Prejudice (Chapters I & II)

10 George Gordon, Lord Byron

  She Walks in Beauty

  To the Ocean

  And I Will War

  Sonnet on Chillon

11 Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Love's Philosophy

  Life May Change, But It May Fly Not

  A Dirge

  Song to the Men of England

  Ode to the West Wind

12 John Keats

  Song

  On the Grasshopper and Cricket

  To Autumn

13 Charles Dickens

  David Copperfield (Chapter XI)

14 William Makepeace Thackeray

  Vanity Fair (Chapter VI)

15 Emily Bront~

  Wuthering Heights (Chapter XV)

16 Thomas Hardy

  Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Chapters 13,55 & 56)

17 Oscar Wilde

  The Importance of Being Earnest

    (excerpt from Act I)

18 John Galsworthy

  The Forsyte Saga (Birth of a Forsyte)

19 William Butler Yeats

  The Lake Isle of Innisfree

  To a Child Dancing in the Wind

  To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

  A Prayer for Old Age

20 D. H. Lawrence

  The Rocking-Horse Winner

21 George Bernard Shaw

  Pygmalion (excerpts)

22 James Joyce

  The Boarding House

23 Virginia Woolf

  The Duchess and the Jeweller

24 William Somerset Maugham

  A Friend in Need

25 Thomas Stearns Eliot

  Morning at the Window

  Aunt Helen

  Cousin Nancy

  From The Hollow Men

26 John Boynton Priestley

  An Inspector Calls (excerpt from Act I)

27 Louis MacNeice

  Prayer Before Birth

 Philip Larkin

  Next, Please

          AMERICAN LITERATURE

1 Benjamin Franklin

  The Autobiography (Chapter VI)

2 Ralph Waldo Emerson

  The American Scholar (an excerpt)

3 Nathaniel Hawthorne

  The Minister's Black Veil

4 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  A Psalm of Life

  Excelsior

  The Quadroon Girl

5 Edgar Allan Poe

  Annabel Lee

  To Helen

6 Walt Whitman

  Selections from Leaves of Grass

7 Emily Dickinson

  Selected Poems

8 Mark Twain

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Chapter 11)

9 Stephen Crane

  Selected Poems

10 Theodore Dreiser

  An American Tragedy (Chapters XLII & XLIII)

11 Jack London

  Love of Life

12 F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Long Way Out

13 Robert Lee Frost

  The Pasture

  Mending Wall

  The Road Not Taken

  Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

14 Eugene O'Neill

  The Hairy Ape (Scene VIII)

15 Ernest Hemingway

  A Farewell to Arms (Chapters 36 & 41)

16 William Faulkner

  Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

17 John Steinbeck

  The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25)

18 Ezra Pound

  In a Station of the Metro

  A Pact

  Salutation

  The Garden

 Langston Hughes

  Selected Poems

19 Arthur Miller

  Death of a Salesman (excerpt from Act II)

20 Archibald MacLeish

  Ars Poetica

Allen Ginsberg

  America