Book ID: CBB001422323

Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (2014)

unapi

LeMenager, Stephanie (Author)


Oxford University Press


Publication Date: 2014
Physical Details: xi + 263 pp.; ill.; notes; index
Language: English

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 preeminent 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.

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Reviewed By

Review Elizabeth D. Blum (2015) Review of "Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century". Journal of American History (pp. 313-314). unapi

Review Theriot, Jason P. (2015) Review of "Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century". Environmental History (pp. 151-152). unapi

Review Blum, Elizabeth D. (2015) Review of "Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century". Journal of American History (pp. 313-314). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001422323/

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Authors & Contributors
Wosk, Julie
Lothes, Scott
Holzhueter, John O.
Jeff Diamanti
Adnan Morshed
Arrigo, Anthony F.
Concepts
Technology and culture
Technology and art
Motion pictures; cinema; movies
Aesthetics
Technology and society
Science and art
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, early
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
Wharton Studio (Ithaca, NY)
Oklahoma (U.S.)
South America
Russia
Germany
Institutions
Center for Railroad Photography and Art
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