乔纳森•贝特，华威大学教授，主要研究方向为莎士比亚和文艺复兴时期的文学。主要著有《莎士比亚的天赋》（1997）以及一部关于莎士比亚的深度传记《时代的灵魂》（2008），后者从伊丽莎白女王时期的文化背景出发，分析了莎士比亚的思想历程。他创作的《约翰•克莱尔传》（2003）获得了英国历史最悠久的两大文学奖项：霍桑登奖和詹姆斯•泰特•布莱克奖。

Sweeping across two millennia and every literary genre, acclaimed scholar and biographer Jonathan Bate provides a dazzling introduction to English Literature. The focus is wide, shifting from the birth of the novel and the brilliance of English comedy to the deep Englishness of landscape poetry and the ethnic diversity of Britain's Nobel literature laureates. It goes on to provide a more in-depth analysis, with close readings from an extraordinary scene in King Lear to a war poem by Carol Ann Duffy, and a series of striking examples of how literary texts change as they are transmitted from writer to reader. The narrative embraces not only the major literary movements such as Romanticism and Modernism, together with the most influential authors including Chaucer, Donne, Johnson, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens and Woolf, but also little-known stories such as the identity of the first English woman poet to be honoured with a collected edition of her works. Written with the flair and passion for which Jonathan Bate has become renowned, this book is the perfect Very Short Introduction for all readers and students of the incomparable literary heritage of these islands.