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‘Sublime Oilscapes’: Literary Depictions of Landscapes Transformed by the Oil Industry

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Published/Copyright: September 19, 2017
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Anglia
From the journal Anglia Volume 135 Issue 3

Abstract

Literary reactions to the transformation of landscape by modern technology foreground the fragility of the planet while at the same time suggesting notions of immensity and inspiring awe. Oil mining, in particular, threatens and destroys essential mega-biotopes, as for example two of the biggest wetlands on earth, the Athabasca Tar Sands in Canada’s northern Alberta and the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria. While we are flooded, daily, by media reports on environmental damage and by scientifically based scenarios of future catastrophes, it is literature with its specifically ambiguous and multidimensional make-up, which proves to be an ideal medium to foreground the ambivalence of twenty-first century societies regarding their attitude towards a radically modified natural environment. The double aesthetics of the sublime, in particular, proves to be a congenial creative (and critical) approach to these fear- and awe-inspiring landscapes, which have been forged and shaped by technology and industry. In my essay I want to show how twenty-first century Canadian and Nigerian writers have responded to the effects of oil mining in their respective countries by drawing on notions of the sublime as they came to be articulated by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and have been taken up by scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through their narrative and poetic ‘sublime oilscapes’ these authors effectively foreground the problems inherent in the split attitude of contemporary societies.

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Published Online: 2017-9-19
Published in Print: 2017-9-6

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Pirates, Captives, and Conversions: Rereading British Stories of White Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean
  4. George Orwell’s Imperial Bestiary: Totemism, Animal Agency and Cross-Species Interaction in “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”
  5. Enacting Authenticity: Peter Nichols’s Passion Play and Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in Dialogue
  6. Wallace Stevens’s Poetics of the Other
  7. T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come: Violence in America
  8. ‘Sublime Oilscapes’: Literary Depictions of Landscapes Transformed by the Oil Industry
  9. Reviews
  10. Elena Seoane and Christina Suaréz-Gómez (eds.). World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Varieties of English Around the World G57. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 2016, 285 pp., € 95.00/$ 143.00.
  11. Carola Trips. English Syntax in Three Dimensions: History – Synchrony – Diachrony. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015, viii + 239 pp., € 29.95.
  12. Annina Seiler. The Scripting of the Germanic Languages: A Comparative Study of “Spelling Difficulties” in Old English, Old High German and Old Saxon. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 30. Zürich: Chronos, 2014, 268 pp., 77 figures, CHF 38.00/€ 34.00.
  13. Fran Colman. The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England: The Linguistics and Culture of the Old English Onomasticon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, xii + 310 pp., £ 75.00.
  14. Leonard Neidorf. Foreword by Gregory Nagy. The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior. Myth and Poetics 2. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2017, 221 pp., 8 illustrations, $ 55.00.
  15. Tamara Atkin and Francis Leneghan (eds.). The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation. Cambridge: Brewer, 2017, 362 pp., 18 illustr., £ 60.00.
  16. Aysha Pollnitz. Princely Education in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, xiv + 445 pp., £ 79.99/$ 125.00.
  17. Jan Alber. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Frontiers of Narrative Series. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016, xi + 310 pp., $ 55.00.
  18. Patrick Parrinder. Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, ix + 222 pp., £ 55.00/$ 90.00.
  19. Thomas Girst. Art, Literature and the Japanese American Internment: On John Okada’s No-No Boy. American Culture 12. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2015, 266 pp., 28 figures, € 58.91/£ 40.00/$ 64.95.
  20. Clemens Spahr. A Poetics of Global Solidarity: Modern American Poetry and Social Movements. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, xiii + 255 pp., 5 illustr., $ 99.00.
  21. Katja Kurz. Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns. American Studies – A Monograph Series 252. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015, ii + 271 pp., € 48.00.
  22. Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (eds.). Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung. Böhlau Studienbücher. Köln: Böhlau, 2015, 315 pp., 3 illustr., € 19.99.
  23. Serenella Iovino. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation. Environmental Cultures. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016, 184 pp., 12 illustr., £ 72.00.
  24. Books Received
https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2017-0049

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Pirates, Captives, and Conversions: Rereading British Stories of White Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean
  4. George Orwell’s Imperial Bestiary: Totemism, Animal Agency and Cross-Species Interaction in “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”
  5. Enacting Authenticity: Peter Nichols’s Passion Play and Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in Dialogue
  6. Wallace Stevens’s Poetics of the Other
  7. T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come: Violence in America
  8. ‘Sublime Oilscapes’: Literary Depictions of Landscapes Transformed by the Oil Industry
  9. Reviews
  10. Elena Seoane and Christina Suaréz-Gómez (eds.). World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Varieties of English Around the World G57. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 2016, 285 pp., € 95.00/$ 143.00.
  11. Carola Trips. English Syntax in Three Dimensions: History – Synchrony – Diachrony. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015, viii + 239 pp., € 29.95.
  12. Annina Seiler. The Scripting of the Germanic Languages: A Comparative Study of “Spelling Difficulties” in Old English, Old High German and Old Saxon. Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen 30. Zürich: Chronos, 2014, 268 pp., 77 figures, CHF 38.00/€ 34.00.
  13. Fran Colman. The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England: The Linguistics and Culture of the Old English Onomasticon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, xii + 310 pp., £ 75.00.
  14. Leonard Neidorf. Foreword by Gregory Nagy. The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior. Myth and Poetics 2. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2017, 221 pp., 8 illustrations, $ 55.00.
  15. Tamara Atkin and Francis Leneghan (eds.). The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation. Cambridge: Brewer, 2017, 362 pp., 18 illustr., £ 60.00.
  16. Aysha Pollnitz. Princely Education in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, xiv + 445 pp., £ 79.99/$ 125.00.
  17. Jan Alber. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Frontiers of Narrative Series. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016, xi + 310 pp., $ 55.00.
  18. Patrick Parrinder. Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, ix + 222 pp., £ 55.00/$ 90.00.
  19. Thomas Girst. Art, Literature and the Japanese American Internment: On John Okada’s No-No Boy. American Culture 12. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2015, 266 pp., 28 figures, € 58.91/£ 40.00/$ 64.95.
  20. Clemens Spahr. A Poetics of Global Solidarity: Modern American Poetry and Social Movements. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, xiii + 255 pp., 5 illustr., $ 99.00.
  21. Katja Kurz. Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns. American Studies – A Monograph Series 252. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015, ii + 271 pp., € 48.00.
  22. Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe (eds.). Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung. Böhlau Studienbücher. Köln: Böhlau, 2015, 315 pp., 3 illustr., € 19.99.
  23. Serenella Iovino. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation. Environmental Cultures. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016, 184 pp., 12 illustr., £ 72.00.
  24. Books Received
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