Publications

BOOKS

Seamus Heaney, Virgil and the Good of Poetry. Sole author. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Feb. 2022. ISBN 978-1-474-45439-1
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-seamus-heaney-virgil-and-the-good-of-poetry.html
Review: Translation and Literature 31 (2022), 268-273; Times Literary Supplement, 2 Sept 2022.

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature. Contributing editor, with Madeleine Scherer. London: Routledge, 2019. ISBN 978 0 367 35886 0
https://www.routledge.com/A-Quest-for-Remembrance-The-Underworld-in-Classical-and-Modern-Literature/Scherer-Falconer/p/book/9781032239576
Review: The Polish Review (2022) 67 (2): 111–114.

Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on her Work. Contributing editor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. ISBN-13: 978-0748696000; 9781474431453
https://edinburgh.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696000.001.0001/upso-9780748696000
https://www.amazon.com/Kathleen-Jamie-Essays-Poems-work/dp/0748696008
Review: Scottish Literary Review, 2015, Vol.7 (2), p.184-186

Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Science and Medicine. Guest editor, with Denis Renevey, Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 2013. Special issue of Swiss Publications of English Language and Literature.
https://www.e-periodica.ch/digbib/view?pid=spe-001:2013:28#3

Re-reading / La relecture: essays in honour of Graham Falconer. Contributing editor, with Andrew Oliver.  Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012, 1-331. ISBN 978-1-4438-3760-6.
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-4438-3760-6
Review: French studies, 2014, Vol.68 (1), p.141-142

The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. Sole author.  Routledge: London, New York, 2009, pp. 1-263. ISBN 978-0-415-97888-0; 978-0415879378
https://www.routledge.com/The-Crossover-Novel-Contemporary-Childrens-Fiction-and-Its-Adult-Readership/Falconer/p/book/9780415879378

Reviews: CHOICE, 2009-06-01, Vol.46 (10), p.1873; Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 2009, Vol.34 (2), p.198;  Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, Volume 48, Number 1, January 2010, pp. 69-70 (Johns Hopkins Press); The Looking Glass, Volume 13, Issue 3, September/October, 2009; Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2010, Vol.21 (2), p.310; Lion and the Unicorn: a critical journal of children’s literature, 2009, Vol.33 (3), p.397; Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, 2008-12-01, Vol.62 (4), p.178; Reference & Research Book News, 2008-11-01, Vol.23 (4).

Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945. Sole author. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press, 2005/ 2007, pp. 1-262. ISBN 0-7486-1763-9; 978-0-7486-3443-9
https://edinburgh.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748617630.001.0001/upso-9780748617630
https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Contemporary-Literature-Western-Narratives/dp/0748634436
Reviews: CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, 2005-12-01, Vol.43 (4), p.653; Literature & Theology, 2007-06-01, Vol.21 (2), p.232-234; The Use of English, Vol. 57.1 Autumn 2005.

Invention: Literature and Science. Guest editor, with Karin Littau. Comparative Critical Studies Vol. 2.2. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2005, pp. 1-301. ISSN 1744-1854.
https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/ccs

Face to Face: Bakhtin Studies in Russia and the West. Contributing editor, with Adlam, Makhlin, Renfrew. London: Bloomsbury, 1997, 20 contributors, pp.1-394. ISBN 185075696.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/face-to-face-9780567105318/
Reviews: Caryl Emerson, Slavonic and East European Review, 1999-04-01, Vol.77 (2), p.280-294; Slavic Review, 1999-12-01, Vol.58 (4), p.943-944: Canadian Slavonic Papers, 1998-09-01, Vol.40 (3/4), p.461-463; Journal of European Studies, 1999-06-01, Vol.29 (114), p.228

Orpheus Dis(re)membered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet-Hero. Sole author. London: Bloomsbury, 1996, pp. 1-227. ISBN 1850756090.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/orpheus-disremembered-9781850756095/

BOOK CHAPTERS AND PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES

‘Introduction’, Face to Face: Bakhtin Studies in Russia and the West, ed. by Adlam, Falconer, Makhlin, Renfrew (1997), pp. 23-43.

‘Bakhtin, Milton and the Epic Chronotope’, in Face to Face: Bakhtin Studies in Russia and the West, ed. by Adlam, Falconer, Makhlin, Renfrew (1997), pp. 254-272.

‘Bakhtin’s Chronotope and the Contemporary Short Story’, in Bakhtin/“Bakhtin”: Studies in the Archive and Beyond, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 97:3/4, ed. Peter Hitchcock (Summer/Fall 1998), pp. 699-732, ISBN 0-8223-6461-1

‘Telescoping Timescapes: Short Fiction and the Contemporary Sense of Time’, in Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany, ed. by Wim Tiggs (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1999), pp. 445-466. ISBN 90-420-0636-6

‘Genres and Modes: Epic’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp.327-339. ISBN 0-631-21668-5

‘Readings: a Wyatt Sonnet’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 176-186. ISBN 0-631-21668-5

‘Bouncing Down to Hell: Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath her Feet and classical katabasis’, in Twentieth Century Literature 47.4, special issue on Salman Rushdie, eds. Sabina and Simona Sawhney (Winter 2001), pp. 467-509, ISSN 0041-462X

‘Selfhood in Descent: Primo Levi’s The Search for Roots and If This is a Man’, in Representing the Holocaust, ed. by Sue Vice (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2003), pp. 203-230. ISBN 0-8530-3495-8

‘The Epic’, in The Continuum Encyclopaedia of British Literature, ed. by Steven Serafin and Valerie Grosvenor Myer (New York: Continuum Press, 2003). ISBN 0-8264-1456-7

‘Tolkien, Dante, and Crossover Epic’, in Books and Their Boundaries: Writers and Their Audiences, ed. by Patricia Pinsent (Staffordshire: Pied Piper Publishing, 2004), pp. 98-113. ISBN 09546384-3-3

‘Shape-Changing in Hell: Metamorphosis and Katabasis in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Levi’s The Truce’, E-REA: e-Revue d’Études Anglophones 2.2 (Autumn 2004), pp. 1-10, ISSN 1638-1718 www.e-rea.org

‘Crossover Literature’, in The International Companion Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature, ed. by Peter Hunt, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Routledge: London, 2004), Vol 1, pp. 556-575. ISBN 0-415-29053-8

‘Thomas May’, in Dictionary of British Classicists, 1500-1960, ed., by Robert Todd, 3 vols (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004). ISBN 1-85506-997-0

‘Teaching Primo Levi’, in Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 114-125. ISBN-13:978-0-230-01936-2, ISBN-10:0-230-01936-6.

‘Crossover Literature and Abjection: Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness’, Children’s Literature in Education 38:1 (March 2007), pp. 35-44, ISSN: 0045-6713. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9026-0

‘Underworld Portmanteaux: Dante’s Hell and Carroll’s Wonderland in Women’s Memoirs of Mental Illness,’ in Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-first Century, ed. by Cristopher Hollingsworth (University of Iowa Press: 2009), pp. 3-22. ISBN-10: 1587298198; ISBN-13: 978-1587298196

‘Cross-reading and Crossover Books,’ in Children’s Literature: Approaches and Territories, ed. by J. Maybin and N.J. Watson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

‘Genres and Modes: Epic’, revised for second edition of A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010).

‘Readings: a Wyatt Sonnet’, revised for second edition of A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010).

‘Young Adult Fiction and the Crossover Phenomenon,’ in The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. David Rudd (Routledge: London, 2010).

Glossary entries for the following terms: ‘Kiddult’, ‘Bakhtin, Mikhail’, ‘Dialogism’, ‘Chronotope’, ‘Ecriture Féminine’, and ‘Reader-Response Criticism’, in David Rudd (ed), The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature (2010).

‘Heterochronic Representations of the Fall: Bakhtin, Milton, DeLillo,’ in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, eds. Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen De Temmerman (Academia Press, 2010). ISBN: 9038215630; 9789038215631

‘Hell in our time: reading 9/11 and its aftermath as a Dantean descent into Hell,’ in Hell and Its Afterlife: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, eds. M. Toscano and I. Moreira (Ashgate Publishing, 2010), pp. 217-236.

‘Heaney, Virgil and contemporary katabasis’ in Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture: A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 404-419.

‘Katabatic Narratives’, The Literary Encyclopedia, ed. Cristina Sandru (October 2011). http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=17641

‘Recasting John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Intertextuality, Storytelling and Music’ in Reading ‘The Heavenly Republic’: Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, eds. Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2011),  pp.11-27.

‘Seamus Heaney, ‘District and Circle’, The Literary Encyclopedia, ed. Cristina Sandru (February 2012) https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=30917

‘Is There Freedom Afterwards? A Dialogue between Paradise Lost and DeLillo’s Falling Man’. Milton Studies 53 (2012), ed. Laura Knoppers, Duquesne University Press, pp. 235-255. ISBN-10: 0820704512; ISBN-13: 978-0820704517

‘Introduction: On Re-reading’, in Re-reading / La relecture, eds. Rachel Falconer and Andrew Oliver (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), pp. 1 -12.

with Philip Lindholm, “John Keats.” Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature. Ed. Andrew Hadfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, revised 2017. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com

‘Tolkien’s predecessors: William Morris, Lord Dunsany, David Lindsay’ in Stuart D. Lee, ed., A Companion to J. R.R. Tolkien, pp. 303-316. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. ISBN: 978-0-470-65982-3; Second edition, 2021: ISBN-13: 9781119691402.

‘Introduction’ in Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on her Work. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

‘Midlife Music: Kathleen Jamie’s The Overhaul and Frissure’ in Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on her Work. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

‘Facing the Other through Metaphor: Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table and other writings’, JLS (British Journal of Literature and Science) 8.2 (2015), pp. 53-71, ISSN 1754-646X. http://www.literatureandscience.org

‘Faire face à l’Autre au travers de la métaphore : Le Système périodique de Primo Levi et autres œuvres’, trans. Juliette Loesch, in L. Guido, M. Hennard, B. Maire, F. Panese, et N. Roelens, eds, Visages. Histoires, représentations, créations, Lausanne: Editions Bibliothèque d’histoire de la médecine et de la santé, 2016, pp. 183-208.

‘The Music of Heaney’s Aeneid VI’, Comparative Literature 69:4 (December 2017), pp. 430-448. DOI 10.1215/00104124-4260409

‘Wordsworth Unenglished’, in Fashioning England and the English: Literature, Nation, Gender, eds. Rahel Orgis and Matthias Heim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 171-200.

‘Heaney, Pascoli and the Ends of Poetry’, in Thomas Harrison, guest ed., The Ends of Poetry, California Italian Studies Vol 8 (Feb 2019). Online: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9cf9h0qc

‘Heaney and Virgil’s Underworld Journey’ in eds., Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh, Claire Kenward and Helen Eastman, Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

‘Memory and Forgetfulness in Seamus Heaney’s Underworlds’, in Scherer and Falconer, eds., Katabasis and the Quest for Remembrance. London: Routledge, 2019 .

‘Wordsworth’s Soundings in the Aeneid’, in Romanticism 26:1 (2020), pp. 23-37. ISSN 1354-991x. Online ISSN: 1750-0192. DOI 10.3366/rom.2020.0445

‘Terra tremens: katabasis in Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle’, in Margaret Kean, ed., The Literature of Hell. Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, June 2021, pp. 133-158. ISBN-10: ‎1843846098; ISBN-13:978-1843846093.

‘Animal Studies’ in Karen Coats and Deborah Stevenson, eds., A Companion to Children’s Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, June 2022. ISBN 9781119038221

‘Entre Belfast y Madrid: Seamus Heaney en el Inframundo’, translated into Spanish by Claudia Alea Parrondo and Elena Castellanos Ortolá asin El relato mítico: Sus nuevas materialidades y dimensiones en las culturas contemporáeas (Comares Literatura, 2023), pp. 19-33. ISBN 978-84-1369-543-3.

‘Between Belfast and Madrid: Seamus Heaney in the Underworld’, in CompLit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2024).

‘Migration and Exile in Heaney’s Virgilian Pastoral’ in Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity, ed. Isabelle Torrance (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

REVIEWS

‘Cutting the Heroics: Ferdowsi’s The Legend of Seyavash translated by Dick Davis’. In Edebiyat: the Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures 6:1 (1995): 143-66, ISSN 0364-6505

‘Colin Graham, Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry.’ In: The Tennyson Research Bulletin 7:2 (November 1998): 103-106, ISSN 0082-2841

‘Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin.’ In: Dialogism: an International Journal of Bakhtin Studies 1 (1998): 118-19, ISSN 1365-0367

‘William Kilbrener, Milton’s Warring Angels: a Study of Critical Engagements’. In: English Language Notes 36:3 (March 1999): 82-85, ISSN 00138282

‘David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic.’ In: Milton Quarterly 34:1 (March 2000): 25-29, ISSN 0026-4326

‘Catherine Maxwell, The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness.’ In: The Tennyson Research Bulletin 7:5 (November 2001): 270-272, ISSN 0082-2841

‘Jennifer Fraser, Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce.’ In: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 2004.

‘Zoe Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation.’ In: The Journal of Jewish Culture and History 2006.

‘Valeria Tinkler-Villani and C. C. Barfoot, eds., Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 2 vols.’ In: Comparative Critical Studies 2011.

‘Robert Harrison, Juvenescence’ (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). In: Children’s Literature 46 (2016): 284-92.

‘Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric’ (Cambridge, MASS: Harvard University Press, 2015). In Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, Dec 2016.

‘Marie-Luise Egbert (ed.). The Life of Birds in Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015).’ In: Anglia/Journal of English Philology 135/1 (March 2017).

JOURNALISM, THEATRE REVIEWS AND OTHER WRITING

Around twenty articles for The Patent Trader, Chappaqua, New York (1979-80).

‘Theatre in Prague, Past and Present’, Contemporary Review 262 (January 1993), pp. 32-39.

‘Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe’, review article in Divadelni Noviny, Prague (September, 1992).

‘Divadlo Na Zabradli: Back Again’, in Prognosis, Prague (12 June, 1992): article on the history and re-opening of Vaclav Havel’s Theatre on the Balustrade.

Around twenty 200 to 500-word theatre reviews for Plays and Players and The Oxford Times (1992-93).

‘Prague Impromptu’, Exeter College Register 1992, pp. 61-67.

Reptile Rhymes, poems by Gaston Hall, illustrations by Rachel Falconer. Kenilworth, Warks.: Richmond House, 2002. ISBN 0-9543814-1-6

‘The man not chosen’ (poem), translated into Czech by Tomáš Míka and published as ‘Ten nepravý’, in Deník rychlého ?lov?ka (Prague: Argo, 2007), pp. 82-83, ISBN 978-80-7203-908-1

EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS AND ONLINE LECTURES

Living Literature, the Classics and You: Milton’s Paradise Lost. Educational video for Governors State University Education Series (Illinois, 1994).

Kiddult Fiction. Educational video for University of Sheffield (2002).

The Crossover Novel. Recorded for CILIP Education Librarians Group (2009) https://www.cilip.org.uk

‘Hot Poets: Poetry in a Time of Climate Change’, Cours public, Durabilittérature, Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des littératures de l’Université de Lausanne (12 Oct 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3PUIJmVwMo

INTERVIEWS FOR RADIO, TV, INTERNET AND FILM

‘Representations of Hell in literature and film.’ Interview for Odyssey, Chicago Public Radio (4 March 2005). https://www.wbez.org/

‘Hell in contemporary literature’. Interview for ‘The Current’, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC Radio 1 (9 April 2007). http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/

‘How to be Creative’. Interview for Professor Noel Sharkey’s ‘The Sound of Science’ Programme, Sheffield Live! Promoting the first event in the Arts-Science Encounters at University of Sheffield (93.2FM; 10 April 2009).http://soundofscience.wordpress.com/

‘Heaney and Virgil’. Film interview for Michael Parker, Esther Armstrong and Stephen Regan, A Holding Field: Seamus Heaney and Translation, National Library of Ireland, Dublin (27 Sept 2018). https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/9869/

‘The Crossover Phenomenon’, Interview for BBC Radio 4, Archive on 4, ‘Once Upon a Time’, presented by Katherine Rundell (recorded 8 Dec 2021). https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hg8dq

‘Urban Badgers in South Oxfordshire: Under Threat from Development’, Interview for BBC South TV (broadcast 27 January 2022) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006pfl4

‘Research Records’, interviewed by Professor Anthony Ryan, Director of Grantham Institute for Sustainable Futures, 11 July 2023. Available on Spotify and Mixcloud