Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology more

Steampunk remains an elusive topic even among its admirers and practitioners, but at its heart it re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. From science fiction and fantasy to websites catering to a steampunk lifestyle, this multi-faceted genre demands greater scholarly analysis.

This volume explores these and other social and cultural facets of steampunk. While often considered solely through the lens of literature, steampunk is, in fact, a complex phenomenon that also affects, transforms, and unites a wide range of disciplines – such as art, music, film, television, fashion, new media, and material culture – and the individuals who create, interpret, and consume them. As just one example of neo-Victorianism, steampunk reflects the possibilities for subversion; it is not a mere nostalgia for corsets or fantasies of goggles and dirigibles, but another lens through which to examine the racial, class, and gender politics of both the past and present.

The essays included in this volume examine these manifestations of steampunk, both separately and in relation to each other, in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture, and its effect on – and interrelationship with – popular culture and the wider society. This volume expands and extends existing scholarship on steampunk in order to explore many previously unconsidered questions about cultural creativity, social networking, fandom, appropriation, and the creation of meaning.