Part 1 Classical literature: the foundations of Western literature -Homer, Hesiod; classical Athens - Aristotle, Plato, Apuleius; Greek theatre - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; Roman literature - Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal; Latin - Tacitus, Plutarch. Part 2 The Middle Ages: Anglo-Saxon literature - Beosulf, Caedmon; myth and mystery - Arthurian and Icelandic sagas; Mediaeval Florence - Dante and Petrarch; the age of Chaucer. Part 3 Renaissance and early modern period: the Renaissance - Macchiavelli, Rabelias and More; the Elizabethan age - Kyd, Bacon and Montaigne; Shakespeare; Shakespeare's contemporaries - Marlowe, Jonson and King James bible; the 17th century - Webster and Tourneur; metaphysical poets - Donne, Marvell and Suckling; views of paradise - puritanism and paradise lost; classical drama in France - Corneille, Racine and Moliere; Restoration drama - Dryden, comedy of manners, Goldoni. Part 4 The rise of the novel: origins - Aesop, mediaeval tales and romances; Picaresque - Cervantes; the development of the novel in France - La Fontaine, Gil Blas and Manon Lescaut; Defoe and his times - Robinson Crusoe and Swift; the novel comes of age -Richardson, Fielding, Sterne and Laclos. Part 5 The age of Enlightenment: the philosophes - Descartes, Diderot and the Encyclopedie and Voltaire; Pope and his contemporaries - Gray, Cowper and Steele; Augustan prose - Walpole, Gibbon, Hume and Adam Smith; Robert Burns -Scottish literature, Hogg and Blackwood's magazine; the dictionary -Samuel Johnson, Roget. Part 6 Romanticism: the Romantic movement -Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Sturm und Drang; William Blake; the lyrical ballads - Wordsworth and Coleridge; young heroes - Keats, Shelley, Byron; critics and commentators - Coleridge, Hazlitt and De Quincey; the Gothic novel - Horace, Walpole, Mary Shelley; Sir Walter Scott. Part 7 The 19th century - poetry and drama: classicism and naturalism -overview of historical/social developments; French poets - Baudelaire, Verlaine, Malarme; Longfellow and his successors - Whittier, Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson; the pre-Raphaelites - William Morris, the Rosettis; Tennyson and the Brownings; the legacy of Goethe - Hoffman, Holderlin, Heine, Grillparzer and Buchner; the birth of modern drama -Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Pinero; Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement - aestheticism (Pater), farce. Part 8 The 19th century - prose: the spread of literacy; the 19th century novel - proliferation of genres, serialization and the three-decker; Jane Austen; the novel in France - Stendahl, Dumas, Hugo, Balzac; the teeming world of Charles Dickens; entertainment plus social conscience - Thackeray, Trollope and Surtees; female novelists - Brontes, G. Elliot and Gaskell; Russian writers - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. (Part contents).
