Title: Oil Narratives in William Faulkner’s Novels

Abstract: In recent years, with the rise of Energy Humanities, oil narratives has emerged as a new subject in literary studies. This paper puts Faulkner’s four stories published between 1930 and 1940—“Fox Hunt,” “Carcassonne,” “Black Music,” and The Hamlet—under the framework of petroculture, and combines the social and historical context of America from the late 19th to the early 20th century to explore the representations of oil within these texts. In fact, Faulkner’s stories neither directly address oil prospecting, pumping and refining, nor explicitly depict resource depletion, environmental pollution, and climate change caused by the rampant use of oil. Instead, they focus on the mining and speculation fever triggered by the discovery of oil, as well as the land grabbing, Indian expulsion, capital expansion, and economic colonization resulting from the scramble for oil. Faulkner’s implicit oil narratives not only reveal oil’s pervasive existence in modern society but also offer a paradigm for us to understand how oil shaped the United States and profoundly influenced American literature and culture.

Keywords: William Faulkner, Energy Humanities, land grabbing, capital expansion, economic colonization, oil speculation

Author: Bixiao Bai, Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, Xi’an Shiyou University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.009