Petrofiction

Further, for Middle Eastern petrofiction, such as Abdelraman Munif's novel Cities of Salt, the novel can seem an unfortunate appropriation of the Western form rather than an indigenous form.

This article presents a comparative study of two significant novels of oil-encounter modernization, George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe (1972) and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), in order to argue that such petrofiction both demands and enables consideration of the world-ecological regimes and environmental ramifications of dynamic oil frontiers.

In Fred Stenson's 2014 work of petrofiction, Who by Fire, pyric imagery assumes striking visual form in the gas flare stacks that populate rural Alberta, conjuring promises of light and wealth drawn from the earth and separated into useful and waste substances.

In the canon of Arabic literature, Munif ’s Cities of Salt and Kanafani’s Men in the Sun are a duo, exemplary of ground-breaking petrofiction.

This neglect of water exists in spite of a growing trend towards reading literature for its representations of resources, most prominently in the subject of 'petrofiction'.

As writers come to terms with the fossil fuel era and "our entanglement" with petroleum extraction in modern life and in our relationships among different groups of people and in our responsibility to our environments, the relevance and urgency of reading petrofiction has increased.

Against today's backdrop of eco-catastrophe and sustainability issues, recent concerns in the field of environmental humanities include the thematic and aesthetic examinations of pollution and waste, toxic/nuclear landscapes, eco-phobia, the imperilled human/non-human cohabitation, climate change fiction, and petrofiction.[…] Petrofiction deals more specifically with the multi-faceted relationship between oil and human affairs.

A pertinent example of the energy unconscious in petrofiction is Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, in which an oil spill is one of the dominant motifs.