Photo of Dr Melissa Raines

Dr Melissa Raines BA, MA, PhD

Senior Lecturer in English Literature English

Research

Research Overview

My research roots are Victorian, and I've published on George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Anthony Trollope. I'm particularly interested in the variety of Victorian realism, the relationship between narrative and psychological realism, and literary manuscripts. I'm also interested in crime fiction (Victorian and contemporary), horror fiction (contemporary), and film and television adaptation.

In recent years I've published on representations of of psychopathy in the Bryan Fuller adaptation of Hannibal as well as on Wilkie Collins's language for Cambridge University Press's Wilkie Collins in Context. I'm completing an article on disabilty in Stephen King's Pet Sematary for Theorizing Stephen King with Amsterdam University Press.

I'm also co-editing a special issue of the journal Humanities on Victorian Realism and Crime and writing about crime, clothing, and identity in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and the 2008 horror film Lake Mungo.

Victorian realist prose, manuscripts, Victorian psychology and neurophysiology, psychology and literature, crime fiction, representations of psychopathy, horror