Carbon Nation - Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture (Hardcover)

Fossil fuels power our cars, our food supply, our climate-controlled homes, our work, and our play. That much we know. What we understand less, and what this book makes clear, is how fossil fuels also condition Americans' sensory lives, erotic experiences, and aesthetics; how they structure what we assume to be normal and healthy; and how they prop up a distinctly modern bargain with nature that allows populations and economies to grow wildly beyond the previously understood limits of the organic economy. "Carbon Nation" ranges across film and literary studies, journalism, politics, art history, and ecology, to chart the course by which prehistoric carbon calories influenced--in both conscious and unconscious ways--the modern American economy and body. This includes our ways of being, sensing, and knowing as different classes, races, sexes, and conditions learned to embrace, absorb, and navigate the material manifestations, cultural potentialities, and myriad costs of fossil fuels.

Combining historical ecology with cultural criticism, this book reveals the profound depths of our dependencies on carbon and the long repressed cultural history of our evasion and neglect of those dependencies. The ecological roots of modern America are introduced in the first half of the book with the revolution in material growth generated by the move from limited organic soil resources to subsoil energies. In the works of Eugene O'Neill, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, and Stephen Crane, the author exposes how coal as a cultural object is used to suppress our dependencies, buried beneath modernist narratives of progress, consumption, and unbridled growth. In films like Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" and George Stevens's "Giant" we discover cinematic expressions of our deep-seated anxieties about living in a dizzying new world wrought by fossil fuels.

Any discussion of fossil fuels must go beyond energy policy and technology. As Bob Johnson reminds us, in provocative and powerful ways, what we take to be natural in the modern world is, in fact, historical, and our history and our culture have risen from this relatively recent embrace of the coal mine, the stoke hole, and the oil derrick.

General

Imprint:	University Press of Kansas
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	CultureAmerica
Release date:	November 2014
First published:	December 2014
Authors:	Bob Johnson
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 30mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	256
ISBN-13:	978-0-7006-2004-3
Categories:	Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Management of land & natural resources Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > General Promotions
LSN:	0-7006-2004-4
Barcode:	9780700620043

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!