Chapter 11 - Oil

Summary

In an effort to confront climate change and other crises of extractive capitalism, scholars of US literature are turning their analytical tools toward an area of study previously dominated by scientists and policy makers: energy. Petroleum, coal, nuclear energy, whale oil, wood, lard, and myriad other energy sources are among the subjects now under study by the emerging field of the energy humanities. The nineteenth century holds a special place in the study of energy, since it was at this time that, according to Cara New Daggett, the concept of “energy” emerged in the form in which it is widely understood in the twenty-first century. In the nineteenth century, the term “energy” came to refer both to fuel sources like oil or coal and to the concept of work itself. The “birth of energy” came about both in response to and because of the advent of intensive fossil fuel consumption in Great Britain and the United States that began in the nineteenth century and has accelerated unabated and spread worldwide, albeit unevenly, ever since.