Crude oil and its false promises of modernization Petroleum encounters in modern Iranian fiction

Inspired by and contributing to the global field of Energy Humanities, this thesis is a literary and cultural study of how Iranian fiction has been shaped by the emergence and growth of the oil industry in Iran, and how oil has been represented in a body of literature, referred to as petrofiction. While the pervasive presence of oil in Iran has been studied from economic and political perspectives, its cultural manifestations are understudied. Addressing this gap in the literature, this thesis explores the encounter of Iranian society with oil as both a commodity and an industrial site by concentrating on how this encounter was processed culturally in eleven fictions written between 1940 and 2010.
Analysing these literary works in seven chapters, this thesis shows how their authors gave meaning to the predicament and reactions of individuals and the Iranian society as oil permeated everyday life, local communities and ecologies, and (inter)national politics. More concretely, this thesis makes three contributions. First, it introduces a new perspective in the field of Iranian literary criticism by looking at modern Iranian literature from the angle of energy humanities. Secondly, it provides a cultural analysis of the text, imagery, symbols, aesthetics employed in these literature works and shows how they reflect a changing notion of the past, presence and the future through the employment of styles. In doing so, this thesis also makes connections between Iran and other regions of the world. Finally, it argues that petrofiction provides an indispensable window into the culture of modernity in Iran. The particularities of oil modernity are analysed through various themes, such as semi- and post-coloniality, labour, leisure time, religion, nationalism, national allegory and gender, and the fictions between tradition and modernity, and centre and periphery.