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Petrofiction or oil fiction[1] is a genre of fiction focused on the role of petroleum in society.[2]
Background
[edit]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
[edit]- Petroleum, Petroleum (1903) by Gustav Meyrink[5]
- Oil! (1926-27) by Upton Sinclair[9]
- Greenvoe (1972) by George Mackay Brown[10]
- Rabbit Is Rich (1981) by John Updike[11]
- Cities of Salt (1984) by Abdul Rahman Munif[3][12]
- Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) by Karen Tei Yamashita[13]
- Petrolio (1992) by Pier Paolo Pasolini
- Tropic of Orange (1997) by Karen Tei Yamashita[13]
- GraceLand (2004) by Chris Abani[2]
- Things We Didn't See Coming (2008) by Steven Amsterdam[5]
- Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) by Reza Negarestani
- Oil on Water (2010) by Helon Habila[4]
- World Made by Hand (2008) by James Howard Kunstler
References
[edit]- ^ a b "Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere Edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi". www.psupress.org. Retrieved 2025-08-07.
- ^ a b c "Call for Papers, Oil Fictions: World literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere | Global South Studies, U.Va". globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu. Retrieved 2025-08-07.
- ^ a b c 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.
- ^ a b c d Riddle, Amy. "Petrofiction and Political Economy in the Age of Late Fossil Capital". Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. 31 (2).
- ^ a b c d Szeman, Imre (2012). "Introduction to Focus: Petrofictions". American Book Review. 33 (3): 3. doi:10.1353/abr.2018.0084. ISSN 2153-4578. S2CID 150227700.
- ^ 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) - ^ 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) - ^ Bergthaller, Hannes (2017). "Cli-Fi and Petrofiction: Questioning Genre in the Anthropocene". Amerikastudien / American Studies. 62 (1): 120–125. ISSN 0340-2827. JSTOR 44982310.
- ^ a b Bergthaller, Hannes (2017). "Cli-Fi and Petrofiction: Questioning Genre in the Anthropocene". Amerikastudien / American Studies. 62 (1): 120–125. ISSN 0340-2827. JSTOR 44982310.
- ^ Macdonald, Graeme (2025-08-07). ""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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b 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.