本书按照不同的文学体裁分为三大部分：诗歌部分、小说部分、戏剧部分。每部分分为两个篇章：理论篇和赏析篇。理论篇介绍了相关的文学术语，便于学生查阅解惑。赏析篇选编了英美文学中各个时代具有代表性的名家名品选段。
本书可作为高等院校英语专业和非英语专业的本科生和研究生的相关必修课或选修课教材，同时也可用作涉外工作人员、英语教师和英语爱好者的阅读材料。

Part I Poetry
Chapter One Glossary of Poetic Terms
1. Terms Concerning Poetry
2. Classification of English Poetry
Chapter Two Poetry Appreciation
1. William Shakespeare ( 1564-1616):"Sonnet 18"
2. John Milton (1608-1674):"Paradise Lost"
3. William Wordsworth (1770-1850):"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
4. Percy Bysshe Shelley (l 792-1822):"Ode to the West Wind"
5. John Keats (1795-1821):"Ode to a Nightingale
6. Robert Browning (1812-1889):"My Last Duchess
7. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965):"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prnfrock"
8. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849):"The Raven"
9. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882):"A Psalm of Life"
10. Walt Whitman (l 819-1892):"Song of Myself
11. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886):"Because I Could Not Stop for Death";"I Heard a Fly Buzz--When I Died"
12. Ezra Pound (1885-1972):"'In a Station of the Metro"
13. Robert Frost (1874-1963):"Mending Wall";"The Road Not Taken"
14. Langston Hughes (1902-1967):"Negro";"Mother to Son"
Part II Fiction
Chapter Three Terms Concerning Fiction
1. Fiction
2. The Elements of Fiction
Chapter Four Fiction Appreciation
1. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731): Robinson Crusoe
2. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): Gulliver"s Travels
3. Charles Dickens (1812-1870): Great Expectations
4. Emily Bronte (1818-1848): Wuthering Heights
5. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928): Tess of the D 'Urbervilles
6. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): Mrs Dalloway
7. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930): Sons and Lovers
8. William Golding (1911-1993): Lord of the Flies
9. Washington Irving (1783-1859):"Rip Van Winkle"
10. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1806-1846): The Scarlet Letter
11. Mark Twain (1835-1910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
12. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945): Sister Carrie
13. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940): The Great Gatsby
14. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961):"A Clean,Well-lighted Place
15. William Faulkner (1897-1962):"A Rose for Emily"
16. Joseph Heller (1923-1999): Catch-22
Part III Drama
Chapter Five Terms Concerning Drama
Chapter Six Drama Appreciation
1. William Shakespeare (1564-1616): The Merchant of Venice; Hamlet
2. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): The Importance of Being Earnest
3. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): Major Barbara
4. Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): Waiting for Godot
5. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888-1953):Long Day's Journey into Night
6. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983): The Glass Menagerie
7. Arthur Miller (1915-2005): Death of a Salesman
Bibliography