petrofiction

Noun

petrofiction (countable and uncountable, plural petrofictions)

1. fiction that focuses on the oil industry as a major element.
   • 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.2013 May, Elisa Warford, “Texas petrofiction: regionalism and the oil stories of Winifred Sanford”, in Southwestern American Literature, volume 62, number 5
   • 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...2017, Graeme Macdonald, ““Monstrous transformer”: Petrofiction and world literature”, in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, volume 53, number 3
2. (broadly) Fiction that deals with modern culture's dependency on petrochemicals.
   • 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'.2015, Hannah Boast, Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature. (PhD thesis University of York)
   • 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.2016, Jonathan Steinwand, “Global Petrofiction Book Club Guides”, in Oil Boom Inquiry Seminar