Living oil : petroleum culture in the American century / Stephanie LeMenager.

Main entry:

LeMenager, Stephanie, 1968- author.

Title & Author:

Living oil : petroleum culture in the American century / Stephanie LeMenager.

Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2014.
©2014

Description:

xi, 263 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Series:

Oxford studies in American literary history

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-246) and index.
Introduction: Ultradeep, petroleum culture in the American century -- Origins, spills -- The aesthetics of petroleum -- Petromelancholia -- The petroleum archive.
Library copy: selected for the Multidisciplinary Research Project on "Architecture and/for the Environment", 2017-2019, developed by the CCA with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Dust jacket.

Summary:

Living Oil is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still photography, novels and memoirs. The book's unique focus is the aesthetic, sensory, and emotional legacies of petroleum, from its rise to the pre-eminent modern fossil fuel during World War I through the current era of so-called Tough Oil. LeMenager conceives Tough Oil as a bid for continuity with the charismatic lifestyles of the American twentieth century that carries distinct and extreme external costs. She explores the uncomfortable, mixed feelings produced by oil's omnipresence in cultural artifacts such as books, films, hamburgers, and Aspirin tablets. The book makes a strong argument for the region as a vital intellectual frame for the study of fossil fuels, because at the regional level we can better recognize the material effects of petroleum on the day-to-day lives of humans and other, non-human lives. Varied forms of art, too, localize the material impacts of petro-culture. The fluid mobility of oil carries the book outside the United States, for instance to Alberta and Nigeria, emphasizing how both international and domestic resource regions have been mined to produce the idealized modern cultures of the so-called American Century.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents

ISBN:

9780199899425 (hardback ; acid-free paper)
0199899428 (hardback ; acid-free paper)
0199899436 (electronic bk.)
9780199899432 (electronic bk.)

Subject:

American literature History and criticism.
Ecocriticism.
Petroleum industry and trade United States.
Environmental protection in literature.
Environmental policy in literature.
Petroleum in literature.
Popular culture American influences.
Littérature américaine Histoire et critique.
Écocritique.
Pétrole Industrie et commerce États-Unis.
Environnement Protection, dans la littérature.
Environnement Politique gouvernementale, dans la littérature.
Pétrole dans la littérature.
Culture populaire Influence américaine.
American literature.
Petroleum industry and trade.
Literatur
Erdölindustrie
Umweltpolitik
Erdöl
Umweltschutz
United States.
USA

Form/genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Added entries:

Oxford studies in American literary history.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 294934
Call No.: BIB 240863
Status: Available

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