The monograph is devoted to alternative history and steampunk – two significant genres of fantasy literature which build novel worlds around the answer to the question "What would might happen if ...". The author discusses the poetics of both mentioned literary genres, and also subjects them to a multifaceted cultural analysis. Alternative history and steampunk novels are closely related to history, constituting a significant but subversive medium of cultural memory – the reader will thus find in the book an overview of the relationship between historical counterfactualism and its literary variation in alternative history novels. The following chapters are devoted to the discussion emerging from the analyzed novels regarding as the shape of cultural and national memory, the alternative history of literature, the alternative history of religion, the vision of (in) existing cities and metropolises, and counterfactual autobiography. The variety of applied research approaches and interdisciplinary, comparative and analytical character of the publication is signaled by the "archipelago" formula used in the subtitle.

This book is included in DOAB.