"The Short Oxford History of English Literature" provides, in a single volume, a comprehensive beginner's guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. Ranging from Beowolf to the "post-modern" fictions of Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, separate chapters discuss Old and Middle English Literature, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romantics, Victorian and Edwardian Literature, Modernism, and post-war writing. Examinations of key writers and works include Anselm, Chaucer, Spenser, Bunyan, Swift, Johnson, Dickens, and D. H. Lawrence; and are combined with analysis of the impact on literature of contemporay political, social, and economic developments.