FW: Call for Journal Submissions: Steampunk

[thomas.lamarre]

CALL FOR PAPERS 
SPECIAL ISSUE 
Steampunk, Science, and (Neo)Victorian Technologies

The peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal Neo-Victorian Studies invites
papers and/or abstracts for a 2009 special issue on neo-Victorianism's
engagement with science and new/old technologies, especially as articulated
through the genre of Steampunk. As
a lifestyle, aesthetic and literary movement, Steampunk can be both the act
of modding your laptop to look like and function as a Victorian artefact and
an act of (re-)imagining a London in which Charles Babbage's analytical
engine was realised. Steampunk includes applications of nineteenth-century
aesthetics to contemporary objects; speculative extensions of technologies
that actually existed; and the anachronistic importation of contemporary
science into fictionalised pasts and projected futures. In all cases,
Steampunk blurs boundaries: between centuries, between technologies, and
between "those" Victorians and "us" neo-Victorians. This special issue will
explore why particular scientific and technological developments are
revisited at particular historical moments and trace Steampunk's importance
to neo-Victorianism, as well as its wider cultural implications.

Deadline for submissions of completed papers: 1 June 2009

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
* Steampunk and the importation/transformation of Victorian aesthetics
* Changing narrative "technologies" in Victorian/neo-Victorian fiction
* markets and economics of the Steampunk universe
* science and environmental politics
* Steampunk and the myths of the Industrial Revolution
* redefining the human: intersections with cyberpunk
* Steampunk and old/new/lost world empire(s)
* the terrors of Steampunk in a post-9/11 world
* historicising the Steampunk phenomenon
* gender constructions in Steampunk art, literature, and practice
* mad geniuses: scientists, inventors, doctors, engineers
* Steampunk pasts and futures (e.g. The Difference Engine vs. The  Diamond
Age) 
* modding and maker practices: objects and (neo-)Victorian materialism
* real and imagined difference engines
* scientific (im)practicalities of Steampunk contraptions
* visual Steampunk vs. narrative Steampunk (e.g. graphic novels or movies
vs. novels) 
* cosplay and conventions
Articles and/or creative pieces between 6000-8000 words should be submitted
by email to the guest editors Rachel A. Bowser (rbowser_at_gmail.com
<http://rbowser_at_gmail.com> ) and Brian Croxall
(brian.croxall_at_gmail.com <http://brian.croxall_at_gmail.com> ), with a
further copy to the General Editor, Marie-Luise Kohlke
(neovictorianstudies at swansea.ac.uk). For submission guidelines, please
consult the journal website at http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/


> --
> Brian Croxall
> Visiting Assistant Professor
> English Department
> Emory University



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