This chapter describes material and immaterial labour in the context of the industrial production, resource extraction, and global circulation of the silvery-alkali metal known as lithium. It focuses on the different kinds of material labour involved in lithium’s extraction from local sites in and around the Atacama Desert in Latin America, as well as less visible forms of labour underpinning the mining industry, including the labour of social reproduction and colonial dispossession. In this context, it asks: how do narrative arts document the violence of lithium’s extraction as it materialises in damaged and dispossessed bodies and environments, as well as those less visible traces of lithium’s circulation around the world, and the different affective economies it inhabits? I suggest that a contradiction or tension between materiality and immateriality, between what is seen and unseen, defines every level of lithium’s transformation into a commodity, as registered within global networks of labour. These larger systems, I argue, are rendered invisible; just as lithium silently provides the charge for iPhone and Tesla, it is a vanishing mediator to what some thinkers have described as ‘new extractive imperialism’. This, however, becomes visible—precisely as a kind of ideological dissimulation—across a whole range of narrative forms.

This chapter reconsiders the road novel, not as a genre of Americanness and the frontier West, but rather as the privileged genre of US hegemony. Specifically, the chapter argues that the road novel does important work in critically mapping the expanding and shifting commodity frontiers of US hegemony, but through the lens and ideologies of automobility and what Matthew Huber has identified as the petro-driven ‘American way of life.’ To illustrate these claims, “Oil, Commodity Frontiers and the Materials of the Road Novel” offers a brief survey of three emblematic road novels that emerged during crucial moments of capitalist transition within the arc of US hegemony: Jack Kerouac’s paradigmatic western road novel, On the Road (1956) and the petroization of American life, Iva Pekárková’s post-socialist transition road novel, Truck Stop Rainbows (1989), and Samantha Schweblin’s neo-developmentalist soya-frontier road novel, Fever Dreams (2017). Taken together, the chapter reads the road novel as following the arc of US hegemony.

This chapter examines the literary registration of the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. It focuses on fictional representations of the contemporary soy frontier in Argentina and the former coal-mining districts of North East England. Specifically, the chapter considers Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream, 2014), described by the author as Argentina’s first glyphosate novel, alongside Benjamin Myer’s Pig Iron (2012), which registers the socioecological fallout from the collapse of the coal frontier in County Durham. Placing both novels in the context of earlier depictions of the agricultural and industrial frontiers of Argentina and North East England, I show how, despite the very different geopolitical situations to which they respond, Schweblin’s and Myer’s narratives share certain thematic, stylistic, and formal likenesses in their mediation of the volatile and violent dynamics of commodity frontiers.

If commodities furnish the backgrounds of literary texts, they are far from trivial details. The cups of tea in Austen, the calico curtains in Gaskell, the lumps of coal in Dickens: each of these objects speaks to us about the material worlds in which texts circulate. While some commodities feature as elements of the setting, included for the purposes of realism, others play a more active role in literary narratives by driving the desires of characters and the trajectories of plots. The pursuit of whale oil, for example, motivates the events of Moby-Dick, just as ivory and opium shape those of Heart of Darkness and Sea of Poppies, respectively. Yet whether commodities appear as background details or as protagonists in their own right, their presence invites us to connect the desires and domestic intimacies detailed in the text to the wider networks of production and circulation that frame them.

Sugar as an industrial commodity has featured in colonial as well as postcolonial literary texts. On the one hand, it stimulates desire and, on the other, it induces terror and abjection. Its status as an object of desire hinges on colonial modes of surplus accumulation as celebrated by its literary apologists. It serves as the muse of plantation capital precisely because its global demand generates revenue for those invested in the expropriating instruments of Empire. The imagination of the postcolonial writer, in contrast, represents sugar as an exceptionally bitter commodity. For it speaks to a harrowing history of abduction, deceit, transportation, drudgery, degradation, murder, insanity, rape and penury. It denatures nature, ecologically, and dehumanizes humans, physically as well as psychically. It gives birth to a grotesque and unnerving disorder. This chapters discusses literary texts from Oceania and the Caribbean that revolve around sugar—a commodity implicated in slavery and indentured servitude.

Drug commodities , and opium in particular, infuse a range of literary texts. From the poetry of Coleridge and the confessions of Thomas de Quincey through to novels by Dickens, Conan Doyle and Wilde, the intoxicant transformed the Victorian geographical and literary imagination. This chapter begins with an overview of the manifold connections between British literature and opium, before turning to the way writers have imagined opium’s global geographies as a travelling commodity, from Northern India to the Pearl River in China. It considers representations of the two British military campaigns known as the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) both in Britain and in later historical novels by Amitav Ghosh . Global opium fictions, it suggests, illuminate the ‘imperial intimacies’ linking its domestic consumption to experiences of the violence of commodity exchange across China, India and their diasporas.

The early modern period witnessed an expansion of global trade that accelerated the movement of people, goods, and technologies, as well as cultural practices, languages, tastes, and ideas. This chapter examines the representation of commodities in the period by focussing on an illustrative example, coffee in early modern England, and the various literary forms to which it gave rise. It charts the passage of coffee from the Ottoman Empire to western Europe, the parallel circulation of textual material on coffee across works of travel, natural history, and natural philosophy, and the emergence of the coffeehouses and the new modes of literary sociability they produced. In doing so, it reveals the importance of this commodity to some of the most significant developments in the literary and intellectual culture of the period, including shifting conceptions of taste, fraught debates about identity and assimilation, and the invention of new forms of fiction.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to fossil fuel narratives to consider whether there are continuities between coal fiction and oil fiction in different periods of modernity and whether there are identifiable formal features that unify fossil fuel fiction. The chapter pursues these questions by examining correspondences between Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, which depicts the socio-environmental consequences of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, and several exemplary fictions of extraction written 100 or 150 years earlier, including Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). The commonalities that persist across the historical gap from coal fiction to oil fiction express distinguishing aspects of life under fossil fuels and constitutive elements of the writing of fossil fuels.