…but this message just made its way into my inbox (thanks, Tully). Thought I’d share. (NB: note the cleverly hidden appeal for ‘creative works’ nestled at the bottom of this CFP):
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) and Brian Croxall (brian.croxall_at_gmail.com), with a further copy to the General Editor, Marie-Luise Kohlke (neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk). For submission guidelines, please consult the journal website at http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/
Lisa L. Hannett 