Canuck's and Aussie's...need your input on your literary heritage

That is an execllent poem for this class  I am still trying to find a full version of Swift's poem about a highwayman going to be hanged...

  Cheers to you! Very pleased to have said summat useful; note the 'ain't said much yet' tattoo on me for'ead...

The one about the highwayman rang a pretty dusty bell in my brain pan, so i did a quick scan and I found this old thingy.  http://www.stand-and-deliver.org.uk/poetry/highwayman_noyes.htm ... It is about a highwayman who dies at the end but not by hanging. Alfred Noyes is the writer.  It's an oldie but a persistent one or I would not have been forced to read it once upon a time (early 80's) in a three room junior high school in the middle of bloody nowhere. All that said, it did not stir me to read and reread like the Queen of devastating poetry, Herself, the Atwood. 

Here's a boatload of Swift http://www.online-literature.com/swift/poems-of-swift/10/ , but it wasn't hard to find so I suspect you've come across it already in your hunting.

Your class sounds like it will be flush with fantastic stuff though.  I hope your students do themselves a favour and surprise you!   

Nah, wasn't Noyes poem I was looking for, I have that already. It was "Clever Tom Clinch Going to be Hanged"

"...Take courage, dear comrades, and be not afraid,
Nor slip this occasion to follow your trade;
My conscience is clear, and my spirits are calm,
And thus I go off, without prayer-book or psalm;
Then follow the practice of clever Tom Clinch,
Who hung like a hero, and never would flinch."

Oh-yah. 

More good stuff! 

I only wish the course would last longer...so I could make them read Ainsworth's "Jack Sheppard", Fielding's "Jonathan Swift" Bulwer-Lytton's "Eugene Aram", Scott's "Rob Roy", excerpts from Pyle's "Robin Hood", Defoe's "Moll Flanders" and so many more 

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood might be interesting for your students.

Oryx and Crake by the same author is another thought-provoking fiction set in the future (I seem to recall that Atwood rejects the term science fiction), and to my mind is a more enjoyable book.

Perhaps I'm getting a little off-topic here, but if you're doing Bulwer-Lytton, why not give them the beginning of Paul Clifford (it was a dark and stormy nigh) and have them re-write it?

Perhaps I'm getting a little off-topic here, but if you're doing Bulwer-Lytton, why not give them the beginning of Paul Clifford (it was a dark and stormy nigh) and have them re-write it?

There's a Bulwer-Lytton contest for the worst opening for a novel
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

One of my favorites is a detective category winner: She walked into my office wearing a body that would make a man write bad checks, but in this paperless age you would first have to obtain her ABA Routing Transit Number and Account Number and then disable your own Overdraft Protection in order to do so.

Because it is not that kind of course. Trust me, I cannot make lessons for this training center based on student participation. I will be lucky if one out of ten actually reads anything...but the idea of using the beginning of "Paul Clifford" is excellent...might use that one in my uni class instead

Rule #1, never start a story with "It was.......".
Apparently Charles Dickens didn't hear that advice, because "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" worked pretty well!

On Oz literature, Alice Pung, a Cambodian Chinese refugee, lawyer turned writer's "Unpolished Gem" is great reading, though it may be difficult for Chinese students, not to mention culturally confronting. It's a largely autobiographical account of her growing up in Melbourne between two cultures.

Pashley, I am a big fan of the B-W fiction contest. Next semester I'm going to try to persuade my E department to institute a similar contest. Maybe for worst answer on an exam?  We already have a globalization essay contest though, so it might be a hard sell.