Everyman's History of English Literature

This is an updated edition of a classic and much-admired history of English Literature. In it Peter Conrad offers not an encyclopedic survey but a personal chronological interpretation of the 'history' through an emphasis on the continuity of major literary forms and on the ways in which major figures transform the tradition which in turn is accommodated reacted against or reinterpreted by later generations.

He attempts to characterise the literature as a whole to suggest something of its Englishness. Above all he emphasizes that English literature represents the self-image of English people whose testament and inheritance it is.