Introduction: Why This Book Is Needed
What They Don't Want You to Learn from English Literature (An Introduction to the Canon, from Beowulf to Flannery O'Connor)
Old English Literature: The Age of Heroes
Beowulf: The hero and the poem
Medieval Literature: "Here Is God's Plenty"
The politically incorrect world of the Middle Ages
The Canterbury Tales vs. The Handmaid's Tale
The dreary world of The Handmaid's Tale
The fecundity of medieval art
A pre-classical aesthetic
Separation of church and state, medieval style
The argument from authority
The invention of chivalry
The Renaissance: Christian Humanism
The Seventeenth Century: Religion as a Matter of Life and Death
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Age of Reason
"The proper study of mankind is man"-or is it?
The Nineteenth Century: Revolution and Reaction
Jane Austen: Without a room of her own
Celebrating "patriarchal values"
Women who are bossy (and talk too much)
Men who aren't patriarchal enough
The benefits (to women) of "sexist" conventions
The Twentieth Century: The Avant-Garde, and Beyond
American Literature: Our Own Neglected Canon
Big country, short attention spans
The possibility of escape
Why we should still read Huckleberry Finn (despite the ugly racial epithets)
Literature from the Deep South
Why They Don't Want You to Learn about English and American Literature
How the PC English Professors Are Suppressing English Literature (Not Teaching It)
English professors teach anything and everything ... except English literature
Why they don't want you to read English and American literature
"Theory"-Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and bashing dead white males
Postmodernist jargon: hideously ugly, mentally crippling
Reality-denial as a critical stance
What Literature Is For: "To Teach and Delight"
What literature is really for
Which literature is truly great?
Truth, beauty, and goodness
How You Can Teach Yourself English and American Literature-Because Nobody Is Going to Do It for You
How to Get Started (Once You Realize You're Going to Have to Read the Literature on Your Own)
What seems like an ordinary line of poetry
The nuts and bolts of literary analysis
The words themselves (what they mean, what they sound like, where they come from)
A use for English grammar, after all
Meter, verse forms, genres, and beyond
Learn the Poetry by Heart-See the Plays-Gossip about the Novels (That's Just What Jane Austen Did)
Learn the poetry by heart
See the plays as often as you can-or, better yet, act in them
Read the great novels, lend them to your friends, and gossip about the characters.