Índice

What is literature? -- Fabulous beginnings : myth -- Writing for nations : epic -- Being human : tragedy -- English tales : Chaucer -- Theatre on the street : the mystery plays -- The Bard : Shakespeare -- The book of Books : the King James Bible -- Minds unchained : the Metaphysicals -- Nations rise : Milton and Spenser -- Who 'owns' literature? : printing, publishing, and copyright -- The house of fiction -- Travellers' tall tales : Defoe, Swift, and the rise of the novel -- How to read : Dr. Johnson -- Romantic revolutionaries -- The sharpest mind : Austen -- Books for you : the changing reading public -- The giant : Dickens -- Life in literature : the Brontës -- Under the blankets : literature and children -- Flowers of decadence : Wilde, Baudelaire, Proust, and Whitman -- Poets laureate : Tennyson -- New lands : America and the American voice -- The great pessimist : Hardy -- Dangerous books : literature and the censor -- Empire : Kipling, Conrad, and Forster -- Doomed anthems : the War Poets -- The year that changed everything : 1922 and the Modernists -- A literature of her own : Woolf -- Brave new worlds : utopias and dystopias -- Boxes of tricks : complex narratives -- Off the page : literature on film, TV and the stage -- Absurd existences : Kafka, Camus, Beckett and Pinter -- The poetry of breakdown : Lowell, Plath, Larkins, and Hughes -- Colourful cultures : literature and race -- Magical realisms : Borges, Grass, Rushdie, and Márquez -- Republic of letters : literature without borders -- Guilty pleasures : bestsellers and potboilers -- Who's best? : prizes, festivals and reading groups -- Literature in your lifetime ... and beyond.