UC Irvine

“Fossil-Fueled Fictions: Coal, Oil, and the Making of American Literary Modernity (1900-1960)” is the first sustained study to examine representations of fossil fuels in modernist-era U.S. fiction. Though modernity was built on a foundation of fossil fuels, most literary critics have assumed that modernist novelists were unaware of the dire environmental, economic, and social ramifications of nonrenewable energy use. “Fossil-Fueled Fictions” challenges this longstanding critical assumption by uncovering how early-twentieth-century U.S. fiction writers grappled with their period’s social attachment to and material dependence on fossil fuels. Combining archival research with close analysis of novels by Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna Ferber, Ralph Ellison, and others, my project demonstrates that half a century before “climate change” entered the lexicon, modernist writers were struggling to understand the catastrophic socio-ecological impacts of fossil fuel consumption—and in many cases, presciently contributing to emerging discourses around environmental and energy justice. Put simply, I argue, fossil fuels deeply permeated the atmosphere of American literature in the first half of the twentieth century.