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 seventeenth and eighteenth 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, D. H. Lawrence and many more; and are combined with analysis of the impact on literature of contemporay political, social, and economic developments.