Sweeping across two millennia and every literary genre, acclaimed scholar and biographer Jonathan Bate provides a dazzling introduction to English Literature. The focus is wide, shifting from the birth of the novel and the brilliance of English comedy to the deep Englishness of landscape poetry and the ethnic diversity of Britain's Nobel literature laureates. It goes on to provide a more in-depth analysis, with close readings from an extraordinary scene in King Lear to a war poem by Carol Ann Duffy, and a series of striking examples of how literary texts change as they are transmitted from writer to reader. The narrative embraces not only the major literary movements such as Romanticism and Modernism, together with the most influential authors including Chaucer, Donne, Johnson, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens and Woolf, but also little-known stories such as the identity of the first English woman poet to be honoured with a collected edition of her works. Written with the flair and passion for which Jonathan Bate has become renowned, this book is the perfect Very Short Introduction for all readers and students of the incomparable literary heritage of these islands.

喬納森•貝特，華威大學教授，主要研究方嚮為莎士比亞和文藝復興時期的文學。主要著有《莎士比亞的天賦》（1997）以及一部關於莎士比亞的深度傳記《時代的靈魂》（2008），後者從伊麗莎白女王時期的文化背景齣發，分析瞭莎士比亞的思想曆程。他創作的《約翰•剋萊爾傳》（2003）獲得瞭英國曆史最悠久的兩大文學奬項：霍桑登奬和詹姆斯•泰特•布萊剋奬。