本书打破传统的线性教材编写思路，选取英国文学作品中比较突出的十个主题，将英国作家作品归类，既突出作家作品共通的主题意识，也强调作家作品个人所处的历史文化语境。在以主题统领篇章安排的前提下，本书精选了经典作家代表作品的选段，为学生和老师都预留了充分施展思维能力、创新能力的空间，让文学课堂成为学习、研究、提高素质的场所。
本书可作为各高校本科阶段英语专业高年级学生的外国文学教材及其他专业高年级学生辅修之用的教材，且各类高等院校专业教学均可使用。

Chapter One Love
William Shakespeare
Robert Burns
Oscar Wilde
William Butler Yeats
David Herbert Lawrence
Chapter Two Divinity and Secularity
John Donne
John Milton
William Blake
Bible
Chapter Three Experience and Growth
Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens
James Joyce
Chapter Four Human Race and Natural World
William Wordsworth
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
Robert Louis Stevenson
Raymond Williams
Chapter Five Faith and Skepticism
William Shakespeare
William Makepeace Thackeray
Matthew Arnold
Thomas Hardy
Chapter Six Female Individuality and Fulfillment
Geoffrey Chaucer
Jane Austen
Charlotte Bronte
Virginia Woolf
Chapter Seven Mythology and Reality
Alfred Tennyson
George Bernard Shaw
Wystan Hugh Auden
Chapter Eight Civilization and Alienation
Joseph Conrad
William Golding
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Harold Pinter
Chapter Nine Cultural Diversity
Edward Morgan Forster
Doris May Lessing
Kazuo Ishiguro
Chapter Ten Utopia and Dystopia
Thomas More
Jonathan Swift
Herbert George Wells
George Orwell