Modernist American writers and artists had multiple and often conflictual responses toward the many environmental issues that became a growing concern as a result of rapid modernization at the outset of the twentieth century. Few artists in the modernist period avowedly declared themselves to be environmentalists or subscribed to what came later to be defined as being “green.” This chapter examines methods used especially in recent years by scholars in studying the range of environmental matters of form and content in modernism. Close readings are provided of important texts by Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck as examples of how to apply these ecocritical research methods.

This essay analyses how material formations of class are related to its symbolic trappings and why such an analysis may be currently relevant. Ecocriticism’s tendency to avoid work-based class analysis may be an effect of petroculture, whose flowing, accommodating logic reduces analysis to critique and reduces intervention to consumer choices. This essay argues that a confrontation between work, class, environmentalism, and narrative could be accomplished via the genre of the ‘boom narrative’. Boom narratives deal with signs of class stratification as well as the labour involved in resource extraction. Those based on actual events, such as the natural gas boom in North Dakota, travel widely, into journalistic and documentary coverage, and this coverage draws on and sometimes subverts boom narrative conventions. Television shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies and Dallas, helped instal petrocultural logic. An understanding of boom narratives’ appeal, and how their conventions get deployed, critiqued, and subverted intervenes in the flow of petrologic. Such intervention would require keeping work the focus of class, and keeping material effects of class the focus of narrative analysis. Intervention may also require more ecumenical approaches to genre, and rethinking scholarly modes of critique.

Fossil fuels represent one of the primary drivers of the Anthropocene’s geological and ecological transformations while their production is bound up in different social, political and economic systems. This chapter traces some of the most striking features of recent literature engaging withfossil fuels, covering examples from theatre (Ella Hickson’s 2016 transhistorical play Oil), fiction (Jennifer Haigh’s 2016 fracking novel Heat and Light) and poetry (Juliana Spahr’s 2015 long poem on Deepwater Horizon, ‘Dynamic Positioning’). Moving through considerations of resource conflict, hydrocarbon extraction, environmental justice and industrial disaster, as well as the way the petrochemical industry permeates every facet of contemporary life, the chapter argues that emergent ‘petroliterature’ is at its most interesting when it tries to find a formal response – whether through stagecraft or metaphor or metre – to negotiate the duality of fossil fuels as both volatile substances and abstract commodities.