Petrofiction

Last updated

Petrofiction or oil fiction [1] is a genre of fiction focused on the role of petroleum in society. [2]

Contents

Background

The concept was first developed by Amitav Ghosh to classify literature about the petroleum industry and the impact of oil on society. [3] He coined the term when reviewing Abdul Rahman Munif's Cities of Salt in 1992. [3] [4] When describing the concept, he noticed an absence of literature exploring the role of "oil encounters" between countries that extract oil and those that consume. [4] [5] Imre Szeman in a 2012 editorial introduction to a special edition of the American Book Review proposed a slightly larger scope: all works that explore "the important role played by oil in contemporary society." [2] [5]

Works of petrofiction proliferated in the 2000s and 2010s, along with a growing critical focus, as a result of concerns about climate change and peak oil. [6] Since its inauguration the term has been widely used in literary criticism to explore fiction which evaluates society's dominance by a petroleum economy and a related culture shaped by petroleum. [4] [7] Most critics were trying to find works that focused on the oil industry before Cities of Salt. [8] This genre has been particularly important in non-Western literature, exploring how encounters with oil are entangled with other issues in the Global South. [1]

Some critics have connected the role of petrofiction to the emergence of climate fiction, in that both are evaluating and addressing the concerns brought on by the Anthropocene. [9]

Notable examples

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Updike</span> American writer (1932–2009)

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

Utopian and dystopian fiction are subgenres of science fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.

Abdul Rahman bin Ibrahim al-Munif, also known as Abdelrahman Munif, was a novelist, short story writer, memoirist, journalist, thinker, and cultural critic. He is considered one of the most significant authors in the Arabic language of the 20th century. His novels include strong political elements as well as mockeries of the Middle Eastern elite classes. He is best-known for Cities of Salt, a quintet of novels about how the discovery of oil transformed a traditional Bedouin culture. Munif's work offended the rulers of Saudi Arabia, which led to the banning of many of his books and the revocation of his Saudi Arabian citizenship.

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gothic double</span> Literary motif

The Gothic double is a literary motif which refers to the divided personality of a character. Closely linked to the Doppelgänger, which first appeared in the 1796 novel Siebenkäs by Johann Paul Richter, the double figure emerged in Gothic literature in the late 18th century due to a resurgence of interest in mythology and folklore which explored notions of duality, such as the fetch in Irish folklore which is a double figure of a family member, often signifying an impending death.

<i>Liliths Brood</i> Book collection by Octavia E. Butler

Lilith's Brood is a collection of three works by Octavia E. Butler. The three volumes of this science fiction series were previously collected in the now out-of-print omnibus edition Xenogenesis. The collection was first published under the current title of Lilith's Brood in 2000.

<i>Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction</i> Book

Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1984 was written by Paul Brians and published in 1987. This comprehensive study covers nuclear holocaust fiction published in English-language works between 1895 and 1984. Brians notes that 1895 marked the first appearance of an atomic weapon in fiction: Robert Cromie's Crack of Doom. The latter date marks the conclusion of this study's time span.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate change in popular culture</span>

References to climate change in popular culture have existed since the late 20th century and increased in the 21st century. Climate change, its impacts, and related human-environment interactions have been featured in nonfiction books and documentaries, but also literature, film, music, television shows and video games.

"Paul's Case" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's Magazine in 1905 under the title "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament", which was later shortened. It also appeared in a collection of Cather's stories, The Troll Garden (1905). For many years "Paul's Case" was the only one of her stories that Cather allowed to be anthologized.

Betool Khedairi is a novelist born to an Iraqi father and Scottish mother. She is most known for her debut novel, A Sky So Close which has been published in numerous languages such as Arabic, English, Italian, French and Dutch. The novel was first published in Lebanon in 1999 and is often used as the subject of literary critique studies in various international universities.

Professor Patricia Waugh is a literary critic, intellectual historian and Professor of English Literature at Durham University. She is a leading specialist in modernist and post-modernist literature, feminist theory, intellectual history, and postwar fiction and its political contexts. Along with Linda Hutcheon, Waugh is notable as one of the first critics to work on metafiction and, in particular, for her influential 1984 study, Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jay Clayton (critic)</span>

Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate fiction</span> Fiction in a setting defined in part by climate crisis

Climate fiction is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works of climate fiction may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future, or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. Climate fiction typically involves anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.

<i>Cities of Salt</i> Book by Abdul Rahman Munif

Cities of Salt is a petrofiction novel by Abdul Rahman Munif. It was first published in Lebanon in 1984 and was immediately recognized as a major work of Arab literature. It was translated into English by Peter Theroux. The novel, and the quintet of which it is the first volume, describes the far-reaching effects of the discovery of huge reserves of oil under a once-idyllic oasis somewhere on the Arabian peninsula.

Constance Elizabeth Maud (1857–1929) was a writer and suffragette.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imre Szeman</span> Canadian academic and writer

Imre Szeman is a Canadian cultural theorist, professor, and public intellectual. He is Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Szeman was previously University Research Chair of Environmental Communication at the University of Waterloo(2017–2022), Canada Research Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta (2009–2016), and Senator William McMaster Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. In 2020, Szeman was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2022, he was the Leverhulme Visiting professor in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. From 2021 to 2022, Szeman served as the Climate Critic for the Green Party of Canada. In 2024, he became the Green Party's Critic for Electoral Reform.

<i>Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature</i> 1975 book by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature is a 1975 book by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Jodey Castricano is a Canadian scholar of English and cultural studies who is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. They are known for their work in critical theory, critical animal studies, and gothic studies.

<i>Atomik Aztex</i> Novel by Sesshu Foster

Atomik Aztex is a 2005 speculative fiction alternate history novel by Sesshu Foster. The novel combines elements of speculative fiction, alternate history, postcolonial literature, and metafiction. The narrative deals with interconnected alternate timelines, one of which is set in a reality where the Aztec Empire defeated the Spanish and then conquered Europe.

References

  1. 1 2 "Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere Edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi". www.psupress.org. Retrieved 2021-04-17.
  2. 1 2 3 "Call for Papers, Oil Fictions: World literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere | Global South Studies, U.Va". globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu. Retrieved 2021-04-17.
  3. 1 2 3 Xinos, Ilana (Winter 2006). "Petro-capitalism, petrofiction, and Islamic discourse: The formation of an imagined community in Cities of Salt". Arab Studies Quarterly. 28: 1–12.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Riddle, Amy. "Petrofiction and Political Economy in the Age of Late Fossil Capital". Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. 31 (2).
  5. 1 2 3 4 Szeman, Imre (2012). "Introduction to Focus: Petrofictions". American Book Review. 33 (3): 3. doi:10.1353/abr.2018.0084. ISSN   2153-4578. S2CID   150227700.
  6. ↑ Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew (2015). Peak Oil : apocalyptic environmentalism and libertarian political culture. Chicago. ISBN   978-0-226-28526-9. OCLC   897001614.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  7. ↑ LeMenager, Stephanie (2016). Living oil : petroleum culture in the American century (Oxford University Press paperback ed.). New York, NY. ISBN   978-0-19-046197-3. OCLC   927363764.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ↑ Bergthaller, Hannes (2017). "Cli-Fi and Petrofiction: Questioning Genre in the Anthropocene". Amerikastudien / American Studies. 62 (1): 120–125. ISSN   0340-2827. JSTOR   44982310.
  9. 1 2 Bergthaller, Hannes (2017). "Cli-Fi and Petrofiction: Questioning Genre in the Anthropocene". Amerikastudien / American Studies. 62 (1): 120–125. ISSN   0340-2827. JSTOR   44982310.
  10. ↑ Macdonald, Graeme (2017-05-04). ""Monstrous transformer": Petrofiction and world literature". Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 53 (3): 289–302. doi:10.1080/17449855.2017.1337680. ISSN   1744-9855. S2CID   148809903.
  11. ↑ Krieg, C. Parker (2017). "Energy Futures: John Updike's Petrofictions". Studies in American Fiction. 44 (1): 87–112. doi:10.1353/saf.2017.0003. ISSN   2158-5806. S2CID   164787923.
  12. ↑ Xinos, Ilana (2006). "Petro-Capitalism, Petrofiction, and Islamic Discourse: The Formation of an Imagined Community in "Cities of Salt"". Arab Studies Quarterly. 28 (1): 1–12. ISSN   0271-3519. JSTOR   41858517.
  13. 1 2 Tanaka, Shouhei (2020). "The Great Arrangement: Planetary Petrofiction and Novel Futures". MFS Modern Fiction Studies. 66 (1): 190–215. doi: 10.1353/mfs.2020.0008 . ISSN   1080-658X.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.