Steaming Into a Victorian Future

Steaming Into a Victorian Future PDF Author: Julie Anne Taddeo
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810885867
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the social and cultural aspects of steampunk, examining the various manifestations of this multi-faceted genre, in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture and its effect on--and interrelationship with--popular culture and the wider society.

Steaming Into a Victorian Future

Steaming Into a Victorian Future PDF Author: Julie Anne Taddeo
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810885867
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the social and cultural aspects of steampunk, examining the various manifestations of this multi-faceted genre, in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture and its effect on--and interrelationship with--popular culture and the wider society.

Speculative Imperialisms

Speculative Imperialisms PDF Author: Susana Loza
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498507972
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Postracial Times explores the(settler) colonial ideologies underpinning the monstrous imaginings of contemporary popular culture in the Britain and the US. Through a close examination of District 9, Avatar, Doctor Who, Planet of the Apes, and steampunk culture, Susana Loza illuminates the durability of (settler) colonialism and how it operates through two linked yet distinct forms of racial mimicry: monsterization and minstrelsy. Speculative Imperialisms contemplates the fundamental, albeit changing, role that such racial simulations play in a putatively postracial and post-colonial era. It brings together the work on gender masquerade, racial minstrelsy, and postcolonial mimicry and puts it in dialogue with film, media, and cultural studies. This project draws upon the theoretical insights of Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said, Philip Deloria, Michael Rogin, Eric Lott, Charles Mills, Falguni Sheth, Lorenzo Veracini, Adilifu Nama, Isiah Lavender III, Gwendolyn Foster, Marianna Torgovnick, Ann Laura Stoler, Anne McClintock, Eric Greene, Richard Dyer, and Ed Guerrero.

Steampunk London

Steampunk London PDF Author: Helena Esser
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350433926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book 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.

Clockwork Futures

Clockwork Futures PDF Author: Brandy Schillace
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681775824
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Airships and electric submarines, automatons and mesmerists—welcome to the wild world of steampunk. It is all speculative—or is it? Meet the intrepid souls who pushed Victorian technology to its limits and paved the way for our present age. The gear turns, the whistle blows, and the billows expand with electro-mechanical whirring. The shimmering halo of Victorian technology lures us with the stuff of dreams, of nostalgia, of alternate pasts and futures that entice with the suave of James Bond and the savvy of Sherlock Holmes. Fiction, surely. But what if the unusual gadgetry so often depicted as “steampunk” actually made an appearance in history? Zeppelins and steam-trains; arc-lights and magnetic rays: these fascinating (and sometimes doomed) inventions bounded from the tireless minds of unlikely heroes. Such men and women served no secret societies and fought no super-villains, but they did build engines, craft automatons, and engineer a future they hoped would run like clockwork. Along the way, however, these same inventors ushered in a contest between desire and dread. From Newton to Tesla, from candle and clockwork to the age of electricity and manufactured power, technology teetered between the bright dials of fantastic futures and the dark alleyways of industrial catastrophe. In the mesmerizing Clockwork Futures, Brandy Schillace reveals the science behind steampunk, which is every bit as extraordinary as what we might find in the work of Jules Verne, and sometimes, just as fearful. These stories spring from the scientific framework we have inherited. They shed light on how we pursue science, and how we grapple with our destiny—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Virtual Victorians

Virtual Victorians PDF Author: Veronica Alfano
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137393297
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Exploring how scholars use digital resources to reconstruct the 19th century, this volume probes key issues in the intersection of digital humanities and history. Part I examines the potential of online research tools for literary scholarship while Part II outlines a prehistory of digital virtuality by exploring specific Victorian cultural forms.

Street Style in America

Street Style in America PDF Author: Jennifer Grayer Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
A comprehensive resource that will prove invaluable to fashion historians, this book presents a detailed exploration of the breadth of visually arresting, consumer-driven styles that have emerged in America since the 20th century. What are the origins of highly specific denim fashions, such as bell bottoms, skinny jeans, and ripped jeans? How do mass media and popular culture influence today's street fashion? When did American fashion sensibilities shift from conformity as an ideal to youth-oriented standards where clothing could boldly express independence and self-expression? Street Style in America: An Exploration addresses questions like these and many others related to the historical and sociocultural context of street style, supplying both A–Z entries that document specific American street styles and illustrations with accompanying commentary. This book provides a detailed analysis of American street and subcultural styles, from the earliest example reaching back to the early 20th century to contemporary times. It reviews all aspects of dress that were part of a look, considering variations over time and connecting these innovations to fashionable dress practices that emerged in the wakes of these sartorial rebellions. The text presents detailed examinations of specific dress styles and also interrogates the manifold meanings of dress practices that break from the mainstream. This book is a comprehensive resource that will prove invaluable to fashion historians and provide fascinating reading for students and general audiences.

Television and the Self

Television and the Self PDF Author: Kathleen M. Ryan
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739179586
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television’s prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection’s rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly “very special” episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.

Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman

Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman PDF Author: Dennis M. Weiss
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191780
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Though the progress of technology continually pushes life toward virtual existence, the last decade has witnessed a renewed focus on materiality. Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman bears witness to the attention paid byliterary theorists, digital humanists, rhetoricians, philosophers, and designers to the crafted environment, the manner in which artifacts mediate human relations, and the constitution of a world in which the boundary between humans and things has seemingly imploded. The chapters reflect on questions about the extent to which we ought to view humans and nonhuman artifacts as having equal capacity for agency and life, and the ways in which technological mediation challenges the central tenets of humanism and anthropocentrism. Contemporary theories of human-object relations presage the arrival of the posthuman, which is no longer a futuristic or science-fictional concept but rather one descriptive of the present, and indeed, the past. Discussions of the posthuman already have a long history in fields like literary theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, and as advances in design and technology result in increasingly engaging artifacts that mediate more and more aspects of everyday life, it becomes necessary to engage in a systematic, interdisciplinary, critical examination of the intersection of the domains of design, technological mediation, and the posthuman. Thus, this collection brings diverse disciplines together to foster a dialogue on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading

Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading PDF Author: Muren Zhang
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350135607
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
In the words of J. Brooks Boustan, the empathic reader is a participant-observer, who, as they read, is both subject to the disruptive and disturbing responses that characters and texts provoke, and aware of the role they are invited to play when responding to fiction. Calling upon the writings of Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Sarah Waters, Michael Cox and Jane Harris, this book examines the ethics of the text-reader relationship in neo-Victorian literature, focusing upon the role played by empathy in this engagement. Bringing together recent cultural and theoretical research on narrative temporality, empathy and affect, Muren Zhang presents neo-Victorian literature as a genre defined by its experimentation with 'empathetic narrative'. Broken down into themes such as voyeurism, shame, nausea, space and place, Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading argues that such literature pushes the reader to critically reflect upon their reading expectations and strategies, as well as their wider ethical responsibilities. As a result, Zhang breathes new life into the debates associated with the genre and demonstrates new ways of reading and valuing these contemporary texts, providing a future-orientated, reparative and politically meaningful way of reading neo-Victorian literature and culture.

Transmedia Creatures

Transmedia Creatures PDF Author: Francesca Saggini
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684480604
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
On the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Transmedia Creatures presents studies of Frankenstein by international scholars from converging disciplines such as humanities, musicology, film studies, television studies, English and digital humanities. These innovative contributions investigate the afterlives of a novel taught in a disparate array of courses - Frankenstein disturbs and transcends boundaries, be they political, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of media, ensuring its vibrant presence in contemporary popular culture. Transmedia Creatures highlights how cultural content is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-generated ones from “below”) that often appear synchronously and dismantle and renew established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it. The authors engage with concepts, value systems and aesthetic-moral categories—among them the family, horror, monstrosity, diversity, education, risk, technology, the body—from a variety of contemporary approaches and highly original perspectives, which yields new connections. Ultimately, Frankenstein, as evidenced by this collection, is paradoxically enriched by the heteroglossia of preconceptions, misreadings, and overreadings that attend it, and that reveal the complex interweaving of perceptions and responses it generates. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.