Overview

Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction is a concise and accessible overview of steampunk's 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 cinema's unique relationship with steampunk, it places this burgeoning genre in the context of ongoing debates within film theory: each of which reflecting the movement's remarkable interest in reengineering historical technologies. Rather than acting as a niche subculture, Robbie McAllister argues that steampunk's 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Robbie McAllister (Staffordshire University, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic USA
Weight:   0.363kg
ISBN:  

9781501368608

ISBN 10:   1501368605
Pages:   264
Publication Date:   17 September 2020
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Steampunk Goes to the Movies: The Birth of a Genre Identification and Definition (1.A.) Entering the Mainstream (1.B.) Steampunk as Genre Cinema 9 (1.C.) Prototype to Archetype: Collating Steampunk in Film (1.D.) 2. Reengineered and Repurposed: Steampunk as Adaptation Adaptation and Reception: 'Sticking-Up' The Wild Wild West (2.A.) Auteur-ity and Authority: Inferring Legitimacy on the Adaptation (2.B.) Adaptation, Homogenisation and the Blockbuster (2.C.) Adaptation and the Transmedia 'Mash-Up' (2.D.) 'Steampunking': Genre as Adaptive Methodology (2.E.) 3. Dreams of Steam: Nostalgia for an Age of Imagined Industry Spectacular Machines: The Nuts and Bolts of the Steampunk Skin (3.A.) Technological Virtues: The Wonders and Horrors of Mechanical Progress (3.B.) Craftsmanship and Mechanical Mastery (3.C.) Cinematic Production and the Steampunk Object (3.D.) 4. Historical Identities: Representation in the Steampunk Empire Visions of Antiquity and the Fashion of History (4.A.) Global Industries: Colonialism and National Heritage (4.B.) Social Problem Cinema: Gender and Race in Steampunk's Histories (4.C.) Mechanical Bodies and Electric Souls: Assembling the Steampunk Cyborg (4.D.) 5. Clockwork Modernities: Tinkering with Time in a Steampunk Age Rationality, Reason and Industrial Fantasies (5.A.) Magical Machines and the Technological Occult (5.B.) Postmodernity and the New Real (5.C.) Industrial Renascence: The Persistence of Modernity (5.D.) Beyond Space and Time: Exploring Alternative Modernities (5.E.) 6. Gearing Down: Making the Past Present in Steampunk Cinema Works Cited Bibliography

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 Information

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.

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