Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories by Roger Whitson (review)

Roger Whitson’s Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories takes up the ambitious task of uniting steampunk, nineteenth-century studies, and digital humanities. It argues that steampunk is “a research methodology” and even a “public form of Victorian scholarship that . . . spread[s] conversations about the period beyond academia” (4, 169). To Whitson, steampunk is not nostalgic, escapist, or uninformed; instead, its alternate histories help us see history itself as “a punk mashup of voices, both real and imagined, human and non-human,” and as “not linear, but layered, recursive, branching, conjectural, and algorithmic” (191). We can learn, Whitson argues, from alternate history’s “rejection of the linear temporality too-often associated with cultural historicism” and “embrace . . . the non-human mechanisms whose operational and recursive temporalities impact the lives of human beings in increasingly visible ways” (11). This attention to steampunk “challenges literary studies to move beyond close, or even distant, readings of texts” and encourages us to “[be] sensitive to the way different materials, different technologies, and different temporalities change our relationship to the past” (5). Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities also calls for a change in understanding digital humanities by portraying aspects of steampunk fandom as a form of DH that emphasizes tinkering and that reveals the nineteenth century itself as “a digital system whose discrete elements are decontextualized, remixed, remade, appropriated, and otherwise transformed to serve various political, cultural, and technological purposes and are not limited to archival or historical preservation” (7).

The book adheres to these principles even in its structure. Because Whitson believes that “presenting the anachronisms of non-human recursive history in a linear or sequential fashion is contrary to the theoretical possibilities embedded in the practice,” he divides each chapter into three sections: one on issues in nineteenth-century science or technology; one on specific steampunk novels; and one analyzing “either a public steampunk project, a hobbyist or fan-made creation, or an issue in the digital humanities” (23). The book’s multiple subjects and interdisciplinary focus invite several theoretical lenses—including historicism, postcolonialism, intersectionality, ecocriticism, the Anthropocene, Marxism, and queer theory—and it is these theories, rather than academic disciplines or a chronological approach to history, that structure the chapters, a project Whitson relates to “Rosi Braidotti’s call to reject the homogenizing and exclusionary tactics of humanism” as part of a “posthuman affirmative politics” (22). But despite this nonlinear and nonchronological structure, the monograph does not feel disjointed or aimless; rather, it furthers his argument that even the nineteenth century itself was invested in “counterfactual inquiry rooted in an awareness of technological processes and materialities” (21).

While much of Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities addresses works of steampunk, covering such diverse topics as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine (1990), The Clock of the Long Now (a clock designed to run for 10,000 years), cosplay (“a form of cultural expression where fans dress up in costumes of their favorite characters”), and the video game Sunless Sea (2015), Whitson also attends to more traditional aspects of nineteenth-century literature and culture (158). He considers William Blake and William Morris as practitioners of a sort of steampunk, since both “tinker with history by appealing to older forms of craftsmanship against the emergence of industrialized standardization” (18). He treats Isabella Bird’s 1896 photographic travel-book Chinese Pictures: Notes on Photographs Made in China as a Victorian manifestation of counterfactual impulses, and James Hutton’s The Theory of the Earth (1788) as an early example of anthropogenic thinking. Friedrich Engels’s “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (1876) and The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) are here examples of a posthuman, steampunk-style attention to the “dialectical interplay of human and non-human” (130).

This book’s most novel...