Preface and Acknowledgement

As an important branch of world literature, British literature has undergone over a millennium of history, yielding a great number of distinguished writers and internationally admired classics. With the aim of assisting Chinese college students to acquire an overview of such extraordinary diversity and vitality of this body of work within a semester's time, my collection is sorted by genre, including four most important genres in literature: poetry, drama, novel and essay.

In each chapter, key features of the genre together with its historical development are provided, representative writers for each genre and their masterpieces are discussed. In order to make this collection concise and convenient, selection was made from those British writers and works that are of historical or contemporary importance and influence. Moreover, academic comments on the selected authors are intended to give a conventional view of the importance and distinctive features of these authors and their analyzed works. My purpose is to gives tudents a quick guide as well as a good start for further reading and research.

It has taken me about 10 years to prepare this collection, and tremendous efforts have been made on there vision of it, during which many parts have been amended or rewritten. I owe acknowledgement and appreciation to the following individuals, all of them are my postgraduate students or Ph. D candidates:

First of all，I own thanks to my former postgraduate students，Ms. Chang Hailan（常海兰），Ms. Chen Kangni（陈康妮），Ms. Gao Jingting （高婧婷），Ms. Li Huifang（李卉芳），Ms. Lin Xi（林茜），Ms. Ma Xiaoyuan （马晓园），Ms. Qin Jiaxi（秦佳曦）and Ms. Shao Chunfa（邵春发）. They contributed in collecting and typing the selected readings and submitted parts of the preliminary draft based on an outline I designed. Without their efforts the subsequent work would have been impossible.

Secondly，I would like to give my sincere appreciation to my Ph. D students，Ms. Xiao Chunduan（肖淳端），associate professor from Jinan University，and Ms. Dong Qiufang （董秋芳），assistant professor from Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College. They are the co-editors and both of them have devoted much time and effort to the numerous revisions of this collection. Without their contributions，this book would not be in its present form.

Last, but not the least, I should give credit to Dr. Thomas Moran, the foreign expert who has been working in Jinan University for such a long time that he regards Jinan as his real home. Tom has proofread the whole book and helped in revising the final draft until the very last minute.

Though we have tried our best, defects and mistakes are unavoidable. For the blunders that may have escaped their scrutiny, I alone am responsible.

Pu Ruoqian（蒲若茜）

Jinan University