Chaucerian epic and romance
Chaucer, Langland and the treachery of the text
Two versions of pastoral: Arcady and Faeryland
The sonnet: history of a form
Miracles, moralities and Marlowe
Shakespeare: tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy
The tragedy and comedy of revenge
Milton, 'author and end of all things'
The lost paradise of the lyric
Paradise Lost and its predestining
Acting and being: comedy from Wycherley to Sheridan
Swift, Pope and the goddess of unreason
Inventing the novel: Defoe
Richardson and Fielding: tragic pastoral and comic epic
Sterne: tragedy, comedy, irony
Johnson's lives and Boswell's life
Wordsworth, Coleridge and the failed God
Dickens and the breeding of monsters
The novel's natural history
"From romance to realism': Tennyson and Browning
Epic, romance and the novel
The Waste Land and the Wastobe Land
'Too much history'? 'Too many books'?
