Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology
Edited by: Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller
Steampunk imagines a world that wasn’t, where the Victorian Era meets the modern age, its technology, fashion, and values tempered with a dose of anti-modernism. Originally a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy literature, steampunk has become a complex phenomenon that encompasses art, music, film, television, fashion, new media, and material culture. Steaming into a Victorian Future collects essays that consider the social and cultural aspects of steampunk, exploring many previously unconsidered questions about cultural creativity, social networking, fandom, appropriation, and the creation of meaning. Featuring an afterword by steampunk expert Jeff VanderMeer, the volume offers a wide ranging look at the impact of steampunk, as well as the individuals who create, interpret, and consume it.
Julie Anne Taddeo teaches British history at University of Maryland, College Park. She is author of Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity (2002), co-editor of The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV and History (2009), and editor of Catherine Cookson Country: On the Borders of Legitimacy, Fiction & History (2012).
Cynthia J. Miller is the Film Review Editor of Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is the editor of Too Bold for the Box Office: The Mockumentary from Big Screen to Small (2012) and coeditor of 1950s “Rocketman” TV Series and Their Fans: Cadets, Rangers, and Junior Space Men (2012) and Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier (2012).
CONTENTS
Ken Dvorak • Foreword
Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller • Introduction
Catherine Siemann • Some Notes on the Steampunk Social Problem Novel
Mike Perschon • Useful Troublemakers: Social Retrofuturism in the Steampunk Novels of Gail Carriger and Cherie Priest
Julie Anne Taddeo • Corsets of Steel: Steampunk’s Reimagining of Victorian Femininity
Dru Pagliassotti • Love and the Machine: Technology and Human Relationships in Steampunk Romance and Erotica
Jamieson Ridenhour • “Anything is Possible for a Man in a Top Hat with a Monkey, with a Monocle:” Remixing Steampunk in Professor Elemental’s The Indifference Engine
Erika Behrisch Elce • “In sum, evil has prevailed”: The Moral Morass of Science and Exploration in Jacques Tardi’s The Arctic Marauder
John C. Tibbetts • “Fulminations and Fulgurators”: Jules Verne, Karel Zeman, and Steampunk Cinema
Cynthia J. Miller • Airships East, Zeppelins West: Steampunk’s Fantastic Frontiers
Suzanne Barber and Matt Hale • Enacting the Never-Was: Upcycling the Past, Present, and Future in Steampunk
Diana M. Pho • Objectified and Politicized: The Dynamics of Ideology and Consumerism in Steampunk Subculture
Sally-Anne Huxtable • “Love the Machine, Hate the Factory”: Steampunk Design and the Vision of a Victorian Future
Amy Sue Bix • Steve Jobs versus the Victorians: Steampunk, Design, and the History of Technology in Society
A. Bowdoin Van Riper • Remaking the World: The Steampunk Inventor on Page and Screen
Jeanette Atkinson • Steampunk’s Legacy: Collecting and Exhibiting the Future of Yesterday
Jeff VanderMeer • Afterword
