petrofiction

English

Etymology

Originally coined as petro- +‎ fiction by Amitav Ghosh in his review of Abdel Rahman Munif's quintet of novels Cities of Salt (published by New Republic in March 1992). The term was subsequently broadened by Imre Szeman in a 2012 article in American Book Review.

Noun

petrofiction (countable and uncountable, plural petrofictions)

1. fiction that focuses on the oil industry as a major element.
   • 2013 May, Elisa Warford, “Texas petrofiction: regionalism and the oil stories of Winifred Sanford”, in Southwestern American Literature, volume 62, number 5:

     Further, for Middle Eastern petrofiction, such as Abdelraman Munif's novel Cities of Salt, the novel can seem an unfortunate appropriation of the Western form rather than an indigenous form.

   • 2017, Graeme Macdonald, ““Monstrous transformer”: Petrofiction and world literature”, in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, volume 53, number 3:

     This article presents a comparative study of two significant novels of oil-encounter modernization, George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe (1972) and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), in order to argue that such petrofiction both demands and enables consideration of the world-ecological regimes and environmental ramifications of dynamic oil frontiers.

   • 2019, Jenny Kerber, “Corrosive Aesthetics: On the Receiving End of Oil and Gas in Who by Fire”, in Canadian Literature, number 239:

     In Fred Stenson's 2014 work of petrofiction, Who by Fire, pyric imagery assumes striking visual form in the gas flare stacks that populate rural Alberta, conjuring promises of light and wealth drawn from the earth and separated into useful and waste substances.

   • 2019, Saima Bashir, Sohail Ahmad Saeed, “Contemporary Arab Petrofiction: Opening up Biopolitical Spaces for the Dispossessed”, in Postcolonial Interventions, volume 4, number 3, page 249:

     In the canon of Arabic literature, Munif ’s Cities of Salt and Kanafani’s Men in the Sun are a duo, exemplary of ground-breaking petrofiction.

2. (by extension) Fiction that deals with modern culture's dependency on petrochemicals.
   • 2015, Hannah Boast, Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature. (PhD thesis University of York):

     This neglect of water exists in spite of a growing trend towards reading literature for its representations of resources, most prominently in the subject of 'petrofiction'.

   • 2016, Jonathan Steinwand, “Global Petrofiction Book Club Guides”, in Oil Boom Inquiry Seminar:

     As writers come to terms with the fossil fuel era and "our entanglement" with petroleum extraction in modern life and in our relationships among different groups of people and in our responsibility to our environments, the relevance and urgency of reading petrofiction has increased.

   • 2018 April-July, Jessica Maufort, “Book Review: Energy Humanities: An Anthology”, in Ariel, volume 49, numbers 2-3:

     Against today's backdrop of eco-catastrophe and sustainability issues, recent concerns in the field of environmental humanities include the thematic and aesthetic examinations of pollution and waste, toxic/nuclear landscapes, eco-phobia, the imperilled human/non-human cohabitation, climate change fiction, and petrofiction. […] Petrofiction deals more specifically with the multi-faceted relationship between oil and human affairs.

   • 2019, Christa Grewe-Volpp, “Oil as matter, oil as discourse: Tom McCarthy's Satin Island”, in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, volume 23, number 2:

     A pertinent example of the energy unconscious in petrofiction is Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, in which an oil spill is one of the dominant motifs.