International Journal of Business and Social Science

ISSN 2219-1933 (Print), 2219-6021 (Online) DOI: 10.30845/ijbss

Beyond Holocene: The question of Peak oil in Eco-fiction
Mofeed Bahjat Sabri

Abstract
During the latest decades, significant issues that are correlated with maintaining the ecosystem and the depletion of oil started to gain wide popularity amid serious challenges the world is facing today. It is clear that nature-writings and sciences are interacting with each other in imaging, picturing out and forming the humans’ life. The question that comes to mind is what about the contribution of literary works in stirring up the cultural imagination? In a point of fact, many Eco-critics and scholars started to promote for a deeper invest in geological and ecological disciplines, noting that Eco-criticism is regarded as the interdisciplinary field that calls for a broader understanding of both the humans and nonhumans’ world. Hence, Eco-fiction works have come to evaluate the sustainable means of life, by referring to cases that strained the dominant culture like the impact of peak oil on the Holocene. In response to the challenges that contemporary societies pose to literature, it is important to bring into view novels that demonstrate different attitudes in quest to see what is the relevance of fossils fuel to the upcoming geological era after the Holocene? Considering the fact that Michael Crichton’s State of Fear still fuels contradicted views and attitudes, however, focusing on the debated work aforesaid in addition to Alex Scarrow’s Last light is an attempt to show that as an acknowledged approach, Geoscience in literature is better suited to arouse common sense on many phenomena in the surrounding world. It can be argued that, by adopting this understanding, the two novels are able to hold on to the traditional literary concepts; thereby, constructs the route by which the development of Eco-fiction is likely to take.

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