Chapter 10 “Some Traveller from New Zealand”: Steampunk, Retrofuturism, and the Limits of Revivalism in Philip Reeve’s and Peter Jackson’s Mortal Engines

In: Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism
Authors:
Kevin Moberly
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Brent Moberly
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Type:
Chapter
Pages:
263–287
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004688353_012

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Abstract

Peter Jackson’s 2018 Mortal Engines embodies one of the central contradictions of steampunk and related genres of retrofuturism. As with Philip Reeve’s novel of the same name, it offers audiences a spectacular, post-apocalyptic vision of the future that is ultimately constructed in the image of a past that never happened. In doing so, Jackson deploys the neo-Victorian in much the same way that proponents of the Gothic Revival deployed the medieval in the mid-nineteenth century—as a kind of a missed historical opportunity that, when projected into the future, allows the present to imagine a way around and forward from the current impasse. By examining Jackson’s film and Reeve’s novel in this light, this chapter seeks to better understand the problematics of how steampunk, neo-Victorianism, and other forms of retrofuturism harness the aesthetic and political potentials of the Gothic Revival while ostensibly distancing themselves from the legacy of nationalism, racism, and cultural imperialism that was part and parcel of the movement.

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Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism

Re-appropriating the Victorian and Medieval Pasts

Series:  Neo-Victorian Series, Volume: 9 and  Neo-Victorian Series Online, Volume: 9
Cover Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism
E-Book ISBN:
9789004688353
Publisher:
Brill
Print Publication Date:
17 Apr 2024

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