More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 1 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

This book attempts to supply basic bibliographic information on the outstanding features of French literature and scholarship, with details of English translations. It begins with the "Serments de Strasbourg" of A.D. 842, the earliest extant text in French, and ends with authors whose reputations were established by 1960. Writers from outside France have been included only if in the main stream of French literature.