British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom along with that of Isles of Man and Channel Islands. For purposes of focused study, it has been divided into Middle Ages, Elizabethan period, Restoration era, Romantic period, Victorian era and the Modern period. Although literature of earlier times exists, Geoffrey Chaucer, the 14th century poet is said to be the first most important exponent of British Literature. The present work Studies in British Literature covers the representative writers right from Geoffrey Chaucer to Julian Barnes. All the great works of the great writers are represented here. So one can find articles on writers like Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Fielding, Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Brontë, Ruskin, George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Hopkins, Shaw, Kipling, Yeats, Synge, T. S. Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Beckett and Barnes. References have been given to several others in the text. All this is an interesting and useful endeavour. The articles are critical, comprehensive and updated. The book provides a glimpse of British Literature under one cover. It will ably serve the needs of students, teachers and researchers of English Literature, particularly British Literature.

Table of Contents:
Author’s Note; Introduction; 1. Beowulf: As An Old English Epic; 2. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Supreme Storyteller; 3. Edmund Spenser and His The Faerie Queene; 4. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus as a Romantic Tragedy; 5. Wit, Beauty and Perception in John Donne’s Poetry; 6. Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour; 7. Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Hamlet; 8. Francis Bacon as a Prophet of Knowledge; 9. John Milton’s Paradise Lost Book I; 10. John Dryden’s All for Love as a Romantic Tragedy; 11. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews as a Comic Epic in Prose; 12. Samuel Johnson; 13. William Blake as a Mystic Poet; 14. William Wordsworth’s Nature Poetry; 15. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley as a Historical Romance; 16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poetry: A Study; 17. Rebellion and Reform in P.B. Shelley’s Poetry; 18. John Keats’ Poetry; 19. Alfred Tennyson’s Poetry; 20. Robert Browning’s Poetry; 21. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights; 22. John Ruskin’s Unto This Last: A Critical Appreciation; 23. Domestic Realism in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss; 24. Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son: A Portrayal of Old Ideals; 25. Thomas Hardy’s Tess: A Portrayal of Tess’s Murder More Than Alec’s; 26. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Portrayal of Evil; 27. G.M. Hopkins’ Mystic Poetry; 28. George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan; 29. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim as an Adventure Romance; 30. W.B. Yeats: As a Modern Poet; 31. J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea: An Appreciation; 32. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: A Study; 33. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as a Stream of Consciousness Novel; 34. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; 35. Psychological Realism in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers; 36. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Critical Appreciation; 37. Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters