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Melissa Raines

Dr Melissa Raines
BA, MA, PhD

Senior Lecturer in English Literature
English

Research

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), film and television adaptation, and the teaching of genre fiction and film.

In recent years I've published on representations of psychopathy in the Bryan Fuller adaptation of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels, and on Wilkie Collins's language in Cambridge University Press's Wilkie Collins in Context. I recently completed a chapter on representations of disabilty in Stephen King's Pet Sematary for Theorizing Stephen King with Amsterdam University Press.

I'm currently 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, as well as Victorian influences in the 2008 horror film Lake Mungo.

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