ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of steampunk, a cultural formation that encompasses print fiction, film, music, gaming, and fashion. Although steampunk is influenced and inspired by the Age of Steam and the Age of Electricity, with influential antecedent texts appearing throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the first important steampunk texts appeared in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the landmark steampunk text, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. Steampunk roleplaying games, manga, animé, musical performers and bands, and fashion trends followed over the next twenty years. As this chapter argues, however, steampunk entered a new phase in 2008 as new authors from outside the Anglophone literary world began writing steampunk texts featuring characters of color, settings outside of England and the U.S., and time periods outside of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Non-literary steampunk, such as fan gatherings, steampunk-influenced art, and makers of steampunk fashion, also became much more common. Finally, contemporary steampunk remains inspired by the Ages of Steam and Electricity but takes its influences from more modern, internationalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist texts and creators.
