This article traces the rise of modern oil culture to interlocking innovations in British fiction, political economy, natural science, and colonial capitalism. It advances a method called “transitive reading” to understand those innovations and to show how writers first conceived of oil in relation to established energy inputs such as coal. The article then reads Joseph Conrad's late masterpiece, Victory (1915), as an ambivalent artifact of the British petro-imagination. In representing the “liquidation” of overseas coal capitalism, Victory articulates a desire for freedom from carbon power, while nevertheless binding that desire to a world where petroleum or “liquid coal” was becoming increasingly constitutive of the self.

中文翻译：

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康拉德的碳想象：石油、帝国主义和维多利亚时代的石油档案

本文将现代石油文化的兴起追溯到英国小说、政治经济学、自然科学和殖民资本主义的连锁创新。它提出了一种称为“传递阅读”的方法来理解这些创新，并展示作家如何首先将石油与煤炭等既定能源投入联系起来。文章随后将约瑟夫·康拉德 (Joseph Conrad) 的晚期杰作《胜利》(Victory) (1915) 解读为英国石油想象的矛盾产物。在代表海外煤炭资本主义的“清算”时，胜利表达了对摆脱碳能源的渴望，同时将这种渴望与石油或“液态煤”越来越成为自我构成的世界联系在一起。