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Full Description
Tracing the genre through fiction, visual art, film and videogames from the 1980s to the present, this book offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between neo-Victorianism, urban spaces and Steampunk. Characterised by its interplay between past and present and its anachronistic retro-speculation, Neo-Victorian-infused Steampunk remixes modern collective memory to produce a re-imagined vision of Victorian London. Investigating how Steampunk's re-calibrated Londons both source from and subvert Victorian discourse about the city, Steampunk London offers a deeper understanding of how a popular cultural memory of the Victorian past is shaped and transmitted in light of present-day identity politics.
Covering key themes including retrofuturism, gender and sexuality, colonialism and postcolonialism, it considers such ideas as how early Steampunk synthesizes Victorian urban ethnography; how Victorian urban Gothic shapes shared transmedia memory to challenge reactionary, nostalgic meta-narratives; how Steampunk video games mobilize urban space as an immersive storytelling device with cities open to play; and how Steampunk interprets the modern metropolis as an opportunity for feminist and queer agency. Through examination of Victorian-era writers from Charles Dickens to Arthur Conan Doyle, the book digs into works of fiction and media alike, looking at The Difference Engine, Soulless, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, cyberpunk classic Blade Runner, and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate and The Order 1886. An important intervention in the study of steampunk, Helena Esser demonstrates how the works explored invite participatory consumption and considers the genre's potential— and failures— to interrogate and challenge our relationship with the Victorian past.
Contents
Introduction: Punked Pasts and Cyborg Cities
1. Different Engines: Seminal Steampunk and the Foundations of Gonzo-Victorian London
1.1 The California Trifecta: Time Travelers, Morlocks, and Mayhew's 'shabby-seedy' London
1.2 Clackers, Computers, and Urban Revolution
2. East End Punk: neo-Victorianism, Urban Gothic, and Collective Knowledge
2.1 Devils, Detectives, and Deep Topographies
2.2 Remixing Whitechapel: Marxist Body Horror in Second-Wave Steampunk
3. Hyper-City: Steampunk's Retro-Speculative Video Game Spaces
3.1 Immersive Historical Play in Assassins Creed: Syndicate
3.2 Blade Runnering the Victorian City in The Order 1886
4. Re-claiming the Retrofuture: Feminism and Gender in fin-de-siècle and Steampunk London
4.1 The New Woman as Modern Flâneuse
4.2 In Hindsight: Fraught Feminisms, Action Girls, and the Steampunk Heroine
4.3 Beyond the Binary: Anachronism as Queer Potential
Conclusion: An Exercise Bicycle for the Mind
Bibliography
Index
