When fiction sees the future of the novel in its past Steampunk in youth culture

Drawing on a framework and characters from nineteenth-century adventure novels, steampunk illustrates a certain power of the romanesque that is constantly being revived. The retrofuturistic recuperation of a Vernian imaginary in the novels of Johan Heliot, Lucie Pierrat-Pajot, and Pierre Pevel is accompanied by reflections on the reading experience, a mark of a didacticism often present in children’s literature, but which here illustrates above all the transmission of a romanesque seen as universal.