Megan Cole

Though modernity was built on a foundation of fossil fuels, most literary critics have assumed that modernist-era 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 US fiction writers grappled with their period’s social attachment to, and material dependence on, fossil fuels. Taking novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and their contemporaries its object, “Fossil-Fueled Fictions” the case that novels of the early twentieth century were in fact deeply attentive to fossil fuels’ relationship to social and environmental degradation. Put simply, this project demonstrates how deeply nonrenewable energies permeated the atmosphere of American literature in the first half of the twentieth century.