Event Details

We welcome everybody to our Ruskin summer seminar series...

We welcome everybody to our Ruskin summer seminar series. Registration is possible, but not essential. How do the ideas of John Ruskin anticipate and intersect with Steampunk subcultures? Defined by Jeff Vandermeer as ‘a grafting of Victorian aesthetic and punk rock attitude onto various forms of science-fiction culture,’ Steampunk is more often associated with the literary legacies of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. Yet this idiosyncratic contemporary mode of narrative, art, dress and music also has deep affinities with Ruskin’s critique of the ethics and aesthetics of consumer culture.

Ruskin’s alternative vision to industrial capitalism is one of liberating creativity. It is both utopian and rooted in the everyday and anticipates the rich complexity of Steampunk. This seminar series, organised with Prof Catherine Spooner and Dr Andrew Tate (Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, Lancaster University) will explore ways in which Ruskin and Steampunk share a radicalism that has been forgotten and, on occasion, made safe and easy to consume. In Ruskin, it seeks an inspiration for the radical ‘DIY’ practices of the artists and makers of contemporary Steampunk, and thus a critical voice that is still of vital relevance today. In Steampunk, it seeks an heir to a nineteenth-century intellectual tradition, but also a diverse range of critical voices that can speak back to and critique that tradition, opening it up to new directions.

Ruskin and Steampunk: Recovering Radicalism places its two subjects in conversation, allowing points of synergy and tension to emerge, illuminating both in the process. Addressing themes such as political commitment, embodiment and the environment, it draws on Ruskin’s spirit of social and imaginative transformation in order to envisage radical alternative futures.