Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction

(Hardback)

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Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction is a concise and accessible overview of steampunks indelible impact within film, and acts as a case study for examining the ways with which genres hybridize and coalesce into new forms. Since the beginning of the 21st century, a series of high-profile and big-budget films have adopted steampunk identities to re-imagine periods of industrial development into fantastical histories where future meets past. By calling this growing mass-cultural fetishism for anachronistic machines into question, this book examines how a retro-futuristic romanticism for technology powered by cogs, pistons and steam-engines has taken center stage in blockbuster cinema. As the first monograph to consider cinemas unique relationship with steampunk, it places this burgeoning genre in the context of ongoing debates within film theory: each of which reflecting the movements remarkable interest in reengineering historical technologies. Rather than acting as a niche subculture, Robbie McAllister argues that steampunks proliferation in mainstream filmmaking reflects a desire to reassess contemporary relationships with technology and navigate the intense changes that the medium itself is experiencing in the 21st century.

Reviews

While academics have engaged with steampunk as a subject, none has explored film in the depth that this book does. Film is used here to elucidate what steampunk is and what its attitude to technology and design can tell us about contemporary cultural attitudes to technology and society. * Jeanette Atkinson, Research Development Advisor, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand *

Author Bio

Robbie McAllister is a lecturer in Film at Leeds Trinity University, UK, where he teaches courses focused upon the film industry and contemporary media change. His research has evolved from an interest in Gothic horror into studies of steampunk's emergence within contemporary pop-culture.