Chapter 13 - Fossil Fuel

Summary

Fossil fuels represent one of the primary drivers of the Anthropocene’s geological and ecological transformations while their production is bound up in different social, political and economic systems. This chapter traces some of the most striking features of recent literature engaging withfossil fuels, covering examples from theatre (Ella Hickson’s 2016 transhistorical play Oil), fiction (Jennifer Haigh’s 2016 fracking novel Heat and Light) and poetry (Juliana Spahr’s 2015 long poem on Deepwater Horizon, ‘Dynamic Positioning’). Moving through considerations of resource conflict, hydrocarbon extraction, environmental justice and industrial disaster, as well as the way the petrochemical industry permeates every facet of contemporary life, the chapter argues that emergent ‘petroliterature’ is at its most interesting when it tries to find a formal response – whether through stagecraft or metaphor or metre – to negotiate the duality of fossil fuels as both volatile substances and abstract commodities.