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Oil Culture: Guest Editors' Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2012

ROSS BARRETT  and
DANIEL WORDEN
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Extract

This special issue advances the first comprehensive account of “oil culture,” the broad field of cultural representations and symbolic forms that have taken shape around the fugacious material of oil in the 150 years since the inception of the US petroleum industry. Exploring the cultural life of oil from a variety of methodological perspectives, the essays in this special issue seek to elucidate the complex role that imaginative representations have played in establishing and contesting oil's status as the primary commodity underpinning modern economic expansion and a fundamental ontological construct shaping social and political life in the United States and beyond. By addressing the rise of oil as a cultural problem, this issue aims to fill a significant gap in oil scholarship and to intervene in what has become an epochal and highly charged moment in the history of petro-capitalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Oil Cultures , May 2012 , pp. 269 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Ghosh, Amitav, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” New Republic, 206, 9 (2 March 1992), 29Google Scholar.

2 Szeman, Imre, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 106, 4 (Fall 2007), 820–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Yaeger, Patricia, “Editor's Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” PMLA, 126, 2 (2011), 305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For example, see McNeill, John R., Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: Norton, 2001)Google Scholar.