Dante and Petrarch: Italy in the early fourteenth century -- Villon, Ronsard, and Montaigne: France from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance -- Cervantes and Molière: Spain and France in the seventeenth century -- Voltaire and Rousseau: France before the Revolution -- Goethe and Schiller: German-speaking countries in the eighteenth century -- Púshkin and Lérmontov: the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century -- Balzac and Flaubert: France: Restoration and the July Monarchy, 1815-48 -- Baudelaire and Rimbaud: France: Second Republic and Second Empire, 1848-71 -- Turgénev, Tolstóy, and Dostoévsky: the great age of the Russian novel, 1856-80 -- Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hamsun: Scandinavia in the nineteenth century -- Chékhov and Górky: Russia at the end of the Old Régime -- Zola, Fontane, and Proust: France and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century -- Mann and Kafka: the central powers before 1914 -- Pirandello and Brecht: the years of l'entre deux guerres
