《英国文学简史》全书共15章，加上关于21世纪的“补述”，比较全面系统地介绍了英国诗歌、戏剧、小说、散文等各种文学体裁的发轫和成熟。各章内容安排得当，对主要作家、主要作品进行较为深入的分析评论，叙述收放有度，主次分明。

1 Old English Literature
Beowulf
'The Seafarer' and 'The Wanderer'
Battle Poems and 'The Dream of the Rood'
Old English Language

2 Middle English Literature
From the Norman Conquest to Chaucer
Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Geoffrey Chaucer, William Dunbar, Robert Henryson
William Langland, Medieval Drama, Thomas Malory

3 Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sixteenth-Century Prose and the Reformation
The Sonnet: Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare
Edmund Spenser

4 Shakespeare
Shakespeare in Context
Shakespeare's Comedies and Histories
Shakespeare's Tragedies
Shakespeare's Late Plays

5 Renaissance and Restoration Drama
Renaissance Drama and Christopher Marlowe
Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy
Ben Jonson and the Masque
Restoration Drama

6 Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Prose
John Donne
From Ben Jonson to John Bunyan and Andrew Marvell
John Milton
John Dryden

7 The Eighteenth Century
Alexander Pope
The Augustan Age
Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson
Sensibility

8 The Novel: The First Hundred Years
Daniel Defoe
Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett
From Eliza Hay-wood to Mary Shelley
Walter Scott and Jane Austen

9 The Romantic Period
The Age of Revolution
William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats
Radical Voices

10 Victorian Literature, 1837-1857
Charles Dickens
Charlotte and Emily Bronte
William Makepeace Thackeray; Elizabeth Gaskell
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

11 Victorian Literature, 1857-1876
Victorian Thinkers
George Eliot
Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel
Anthony Trollope, Christina Rossetti

12 Victorian Literature, 1876-1901
13 The Twentieth Century: The Early Years
14 The Twentieth Century: Between the Wars
15 The Twentieth Century: The Second World War to the End of the Millennium
16 Postscript
Periods of English Literature and Language
Chronology
Further Reading