本书的故事梗概皆系英语国家专业人士撰写，英文地道流畅，故事内容准确无误。所选文学作品题材广泛，包括长篇叙事诗、长篇小说和戏剧，时间跨度从10世纪一直到20世纪60年代。所选篇目主要依据《高等学校英语专业英语教学大纲》确定，思想性和艺术性兼顾。将英国文学按照时间顺序分为中古文学、英国文艺复兴、18世纪文学、英国浪漫主义、维多利亚文学和20世纪文学六个阶段，每个阶段内的作品也主要按照时间顺序排列，适当考虑文体分类等因素。为方便学生自学，本书采用英文梗概-汉语译文-作品导读的体例。

ANGLO- SAXON & MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

 Anonymous Poet

Beowulf

ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

 Chistopher Marlowe

Tamburlaine the Great

The Jew of Malta

 William Shakespeare

Hamlet

Othello

The Merchant of Venice

Romeo and Juliet

As You Like It

The Tempest

 John Milton

Paradise Lost

 John Bunyan

The Pilgrim's Progress

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

 Daniel Defoe

Robinson Crusoe

Moll Flanders

 Jonathan Swift

Gulliver' s Travels

 Henry Fielding

Tom Jones

Joseph Andrews

 Samuel Richardson

Pamela

 Laurence Sterne

Tristram Shandy

 Oliver Goldsmith

The Vicar of Wakefield

 Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The School for Scandal

ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

 Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

Emma

Mansfield Park

 Walter Scott

Ivanhoe

 Mary Godwin Shelley

Frankenstein

VICTORIAN LITERATURE

 Charles Dickens

David Copperfield

Pickwick Papers

A Tale of Two Cities

Oliver Twist

Great Expectations

Bleak House

 Villiam Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity Fair

The History of Pendennis

 Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre

 Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights

 George Eliot

Adam Bede

Middlemarch

 Thomas Hardy

Tess of the D' Urbervilles

Jude the Obscure

The Return of the Native

Far From the Madding Crowd

The Mayor of Casterbridge

 Wiikie Collins

The Woman in White

The Moonstone

 Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray

 Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

 Rudyard Kipling

Captain Courageous

 H.G. Wells

The War of the Worlds

The Invisible Man

 William Somerset Maughnm

Of Human Bondage

 Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim

 Henry James

Daisy Miller

The Portrait of a Lady

 E. M. Forster

A Passage to India

 D. H. Lawrence

The Rainbow

Sons and Lovers

 Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

To the Lighthouse

 James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Ulysses

 Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

 William Golding

Lord of the Flies

Pincher Martin