A legendary bestseller for more than forty years, this is the classic survey to the field from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.

With 274 authors, the Eighth Edition deepens its representation of essential works in all genres, ranging from Seamas Heaney's award-winning translation of Beowulf, Milton's Paradise Lost, and More's Utopia to the great poets and prose writers of the nineteenth century—Blake and Austen, Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson and Barrett Browning—to twentieth-century classics of a truly global English literature—Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Friel's Translations, to name but a few. Color plates—over 75 in all—and thematic clusters of brief and historically significant texts bring to life the cultural concerns of each period. Concise glosses and annotations, period introductions, biographical headnotes, timelines, and selected bibliographies help readers understand and enjoy the rich diversity of English literature.