Steampunk - (Library of Gender and Popular Culture) by Claire Nally (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What is steampunk? Fashion craze, literary genre, lifestyle - or all of the above? Playing with the scientific innovations and aesthetics of the Victorian era, steampunk creatively warps history and presents an alternative future, imagined from a nineteenth-century perspective.

In her interdisciplinary book, Claire Nally delves into this contemporary subculture, explaining how the fashion, music, visual culture, literature and politics of steampunk intersect with theories of gender and sexuality. Exploring and occasionally critiquing the ways in which gender functions in the movement, she addresses a range of different issues, including the controversial trope of the Victorian asylum; gender and the graphic novel; the legacies of colonialism; science and the role of Ada Lovelace as a feminist steampunk icon. Drawing upon interviews, theoretical readings and textual analysis, Nally asks: why are steampunks fascinated by our Victorian heritage, and what strategies do they use to reinvent history in the present?

Review Quotes

Looking seriously at material productions-from corsets, to artworks, to e-zines, to graphic novels-she asks questions inspired by intersectional feminism and considers whose identities these reflect, [and] whose interests they serve.

Nally convincingly demonstrates that we need to attend to the particulars of how steampunk is created, received, and even contested, whether in the form of Alan Moore's graphic novels, the multi-genre persona created by Emilie Autumn, or "postfeminist" romance. Her boundary-crossing study thus challenges us to rethink our generalizations about steampunk's joy in anachronism and its fascination with Britain's lost empire.

Nally's accessible and engaging interdisciplinary study provides a very welcome new perspective on the various repercussions of steampunk.

About the Author

Claire Nally is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK. Her first book was Envisioning Ireland: W. B. Yeats's Occult Nationalism (2009).