Steaming into a Victorian Future

A Steampunk Anthology

Edited by Julie Anne Taddeo, Cynthia J. Miller

Hardback - £79.00

Publication date:

20 September 2012

Length of book:

360 pages

Publisher

Scarecrow Press

ISBN-13: 9780810885868

A popular sub-genre of fantasy and science fiction, steampunk re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. 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.

In
Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology, Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller have assembled a collection of essays that consider the social and cultural aspects of this multi-faceted genre. The essays included in this volume examine various 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.

With a foreword by popular culture scholar Ken Dvorak, and an afterword by steampunk expert Jeff VanderMeer,
Steaming into a Victorian Future offers a wide ranging look at the impact of steampunk, as well as the individuals who create, interpret, and consume it.
Steaming into a Victorian Future looks at the potential that steampunk has to be a contributor to social change through consideration of its past and present. This collection is vast in its scope, critically evaluating 'texts' from an array of genres from the past, present, and future of this literary movement and its surrounding subculture, and is as valuable as an introduction to steampunk and its possibilities as any of the fiction collections available.