Everything old is new again: The Victorian roots of the Steampunk movement

This examination of the new literary genre of Steampunk addresses how the movement has created a new form of retro-science fiction as an outgrowth of Victorian science fiction, and how it correlates in its attitudes and aims with the Victorian medievalist movement. Both the Victorians and modern Steampunks share a common focus on the machine and the machine's effects upon humanity. Victorian medievalists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, romanticized the medieval period; they longed for a past they believed had actually, on the whole, existed. Similarly, the post-modern Steampunk movement romanticizes the Victorian industrialized world, but not the one that actually existed. Instead, they long for the world that only exists in Victorian science fiction---in the works of Wells and Verne and a number of their imitators. The attitudes of Victorian medievalists and Victorian science fiction pioneers are children of the same mother: the steam-powered machine; both are reacting to the same spinning mass of cogs and gears which made the Age of Steam. They are siblings. The ideas of Victorian medievalists, Victorian science fiction authors, and modern Steampunk are explored and defined, and various parallels and correlations emerge through the literary analysis of several representative works from each category. Like the cogs driving the fantastical machines within their pages, these movements are linked, Steampunk turning and growing and building off of Victorian science fiction. Finally, this work examines the future of Steampunk as a literary genre and speculates on its path forward in the literary canon.