Description

A sweeping journey through the foundations, triumphs, and transformations of British literature.

This monumental volume gathers fifty of the most influential and enduring works ever written in the English language. From the heroic epic of Beowulf to the philosophical sublimity of the Romantic poets, from Shakespeare's immortal tragedies to the visionary science fiction of H. G. Wells, this collection traces the evolution of a literary tradition that shaped the modern world.

Organized chronologically and thematically, the anthology reveals how medieval allegory gave way to Renaissance drama, how the novel emerged as a dominant art form, and how the nineteenth century produced a golden age of storytelling. It concludes with poetic masterpieces that continue to define the emotional and intellectual reach of English expression.

Featuring:

• Foundational medieval epics and allegories
• The great tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare
• The birth and rise of the English novel
• Victorian realism and Gothic imagination
• Imperial adventure and early science fiction
• The lyric revolution of the Romantic poets

Carefully curated for both general readers and students, this edition offers a coherent and historically grounded path through over a millennium of literary achievement.

A library in a single volume — indispensable, timeless, and essential.

Included Works

Beowulf — anonymous

Piers Plowman — William Langland

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — anonymous

Le Morte d'Arthur — Sir Thomas Malory

Utopia — Thomas More

Doctor Faustus — Christopher Marlowe

The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spenser

Paradise Lost — John Milton

Hamlet — William Shakespeare

King Lear — William Shakespeare

Macbeth — William Shakespeare

Othello — William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet — William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream — William Shakespeare

The Tempest — William Shakespeare

Volpone — Ben Jonson

Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe

Gulliver's Travels — Jonathan Swift

Pamela — Samuel Richardson

Tom Jones — Henry Fielding

Tristram Shandy — Laurence Sterne

The Vicar of Wakefield — Oliver Goldsmith

The Monk — Matthew Gregory Lewis

Frankenstein — Mary Shelley

The Last Man — Mary Shelley

Vathek — William Beckford

Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë

David Copperfield — Charles Dickens

Great Expectations — Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens

Middlemarch — George Eliot

Tess of the d'Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy

Far from the Madding Crowd — Thomas Hardy

Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson

The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde

The Time Machine — H. G. Wells

The War of the Worlds — H. G. Wells

The Invisible Man — H. G. Wells

The Island of Doctor Moreau — H. G. Wells

She — H. Rider Haggard

King Solomon's Mines — H. Rider Haggard

Kim — Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling

Songs of Innocence and of Experience — William Blake

Lyrical Ballads — William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Selected Poems — John Keats

Selected Poems — Percy Bysshe Shelley