• Written by acclaimed scholar and biographer Jonathan Bate
• An essential buy for A-Level and undergraduate students of English Literature
• Considers why literature matters, how narrative works, and what is distinctly English about English literature
• Looks at the three main kinds of imaginative literature, namely English poetry, English drama, and the English novel
• Uses many well-known examples to demonstrate throughout

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 perfectVery Short Introduction for all readers and students of the incomparable literary heritage of these islands.