Barry Brummett’s anthology on steampunk approaches the subculture and genre through the lens of rhetoric, asking as its central question what images of the industrial revolution come to mean when used aesthetically in a contemporary context. The essays that make up the book unpack this question by exploring issues of romanticism, memory, class, race, and gender through textual analyses of aesthetic creations. Focused primarily on examples of steampunk in literature, film, and material and popular culture, with some ethnographic observations from fan conventions and online discourse, this book is most useful to researchers seeking to understand the underlying aesthetic philosophies of steampunk.
In the introduction to the anthology, contributor David Beard posits a fundamental connection between steampunk and the nature of rhetoric. While steampunk is often understood as merely a style, for practitioners it is the core of their creations and values. Likewise, Beard asserts that rhetoric is not just the trappings of communication, but rather “the means by which we formulate and communicate our ideas, values, and beliefs” (xv). This argument by Beard succeeds in presenting steampunk not simply as a style to be analyzed and critiqued using theory, but rather as itself a central theory or lens through which readers should view the articles that follow.
The first section of the book, A Rhetoric of Steampunk Ideology, explores the fantasies of steampunk. Articles in this section investigate some of the problematics inherent in steampunk, such as the ways in which the genre both plays into and subverts Victorian ideals of masculinity, femininity, race, and empire. The articles outline the ideals from which steampunk springs, and then present examples of women and minorities in steampunk to ask if steampunk is an aesthetic that allows room for feminism and post-colonialism.
The second section of the book, A Rhetoric of Steampunk Semiotics, examines the performance of meaning in steampunk. Two articles center around textual analyses of Fullmetal Alchemist and Sherlock Holmes respectively, examining how these works use steampunk to communicate antimodernist and post-Marxist philosophies. A third essay, written by the anthology’s editor, blends an object study of a series of steampunk accessories with an analysis of a film to explore the aesthetic effect and imaginative use of size and scale in steampunk.
The third section, A Rhetoric of Steampunk Narrative, investigates the stories that steampunk tells. The articles in this section explore the tensions inherent in steampunk, a style that both looks back upon the past often with a romantic or nostalgic gaze, but also seeks to refashion historical tropes to create a unique contemporary aesthetic philosophy. Articles in this section examine the steampunk-style anachronisms of the Dr. Who series; the counterfactualism and alternative histories made possible within steampunk; and the complex positionality of steampunk and other historicized punk genres.
As an ethnographer interested in subcultures, I find the book to be somewhat lacking for my own purposes. Most of the articles focus on textual analyses of steampunk in literature and film. Material culture analyses are primarily object-centered and could have done more to explore the immediate context in which objects were created and used as well as to examine the identities and perspectives of their human makers and bearers. Furthermore, ethnographic observations from conventions consist mainly of excerpts from talks given by prominent thinkers in the steampunk community; the perspectives of everyday steampunk fans seem noticeably absent. That being said, the book never tries to bill itself as an ethnographic study, and accomplishes the goals it does set out as a work of rhetorical analysis. Thus, I believe this book will be of mixed usefulness for the folklore community. Folklorists who take a literary-analysis or communication-studies approach to their work will likely find the book very helpful. Folklorists whose research focuses more on ethnography and documentation might not find the book as enlightening. However, I believe that all researchers seeking to understand the philosophies that underpin the genre stand to gain something from this text that takes seriously the style and genealogy of steampunk.
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[Review length: 663 words • Review posted on March 1, 2017]