作为导读类教材，本书拟解决的核心问题是：如何阅读英语文学作品？围绕这个问题，本教材系统地介绍和展示了阅读和批评英语文学作品的基础知识、解读过程和分析方法。全书根据所论作品体裁的不同分为三个部分，即：阅读小说、阅读诗歌和阅读戏剧。每一章节都在简要介绍和简要分析某个特定的基本要素的基础上，精选优秀的英语文学作品，并对其进行详尽的分析或赏析。

Section 1 Reading Fiction

Chapter 1 What Is Novel?

Chapter 2 Plot

 Katherine Mansfield The Fly

Chapter 3 Character

 James Joyce Araby

Chapter 4 Setting

 Virginia Woolf Kew Gardens

Chapter 5 Point of View

 Ernest Hemingway Hills Like White Elephants

Chapter 6 Irony

 Kate Chopin The Story of an Hour

Chapter 7 Theme

 Tillie Olsen I Stand Here Ironing

Chapter 8 Stories for Further Reading

Section 2 Reading Poetry

Chapter 1 What Is Poetry?

Chapter 2 Diction and Syntax

 William Wordsworth I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud

 William Wordsworth Composed upon

 Westminster Bridge, September 3, 18 02

 Robert Hayden Those Winter Sundays

 Edgar Allan Poe Annabel Lee

Chapter 3 Speaker and Tone

 Robert Browning My Last Duchess

Chapter 4 Poetic Rhetorical Devices

 Robert Browning Meeting at Night

 Robert Frost The Road Not Taken

 Edgar Allan Poe To Helen

Chapter 5 Rhythm and Rhyme

 Lynn Johnston A Tiny Cry within the Night

 Robert Frost Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Chapter 6 Types of Poetry

 Anonymous Lord Randal

 John Milton Paradise Lost

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge What Is an Epigram?

 Alexander Pope Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness

 Thomas Gray Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

 John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn

 John Keats On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

 William Shakespeare Sonnet 18 e.e.cummings L(a

Chapter 7 Poems for Further Reading

Section 3 Reading Drama

Chapter 1 What Is Drama?

Chapter 2 Tragedy and Comedy

Chapter 3 Drama for Further Reading