Oil barely generated literature compared with coal’s influence

Evidence

There is, however, one twentieth-century writer who sought, on an unparalleled scale, to give transnational life to the forbidding subject of oil, a writer alive to oil’s lubrication of human greed, alive to oil’s bewitchments and its disenchanted states, both national and psychological. Between 1984 and 1989 Abdelrahman Munif penned Cities of Salt, a sprawling quintet of novels that engages the broad geography and volatile history of the petroleum encounter. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 198

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why has oil produced no comparable literature to coal — is it temporal scale, invisibility of extraction, or corporate opacity? Worth chasing after reading Munif.
• XREF: connects to: A Saudi-author quintet on oil depredations still only recently reached English readers

Broader Connections

• A Saudi-author quintet on oil depredations still only recently reached English readers #exemplifies (0.72)