Chapter 14 - Fossil-Fuel Faulkner: Energy and Modernity in the US South

Summary

Focusing on the role of the American South in the developing energy regimes of the United States offers a needed alternative to popular perceptions, national discourses, and scholarly accounts of the region as an abjected internal other that trailed the nation both temporally and developmentally.¹ The twentieth century saw the emergence of the South as a vanguard energy region, with industrial-scale bituminous coal mining in Kentucky and the Virginias; oil booms in Texas, Oklahoma, and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico; one of the nation’s largest concentrations of petroleum refineries along the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana; and the TVA hydroelectric frontier of the 1930s and 1940s. Inasmuch as this rise from energy periphery to energy core has been one of the region’s most significant historical transitions in the past century, we might expect intimations of this transition to trickle into the literature of the twentieth-century South. To date, literary critics have been slow to explore these connections.