Major Research Trends of the 21st Millennium in English Literature: A Critical Review

The twenty-first century has transformed English literary studies through a series of methodological and thematic reorientations rather than through a single dominant school. The renewed centrality of digital technologies has generated what is often described as a “digital turn,” in which large-scale archives, algorithmic reading practices, and born-digital texts have reshaped both the materials and methods of literary research. At the same time, ecocritical and postcolonial approaches have converged in the form of postcolonial ecocriticism, foregrounding environmental justice, indigenous perspectives, and the planetary crises of the human-driven climate change as key coordinates for literary analysis. Globalization has further diversified the English canon, encouraging scholarship on diasporic writing, hybrid genres, and micro-forms such as flash fiction that respond to accelerated and digitally mediated lifeworld. Together, these developments have encouraged mixed-method research designs that combine close reading with distant, data-driven, and interdisciplinary approaches, thereby reconfiguring the identity and social function of English literary studies in the twenty-first century. The paper critically reviews these converging trends, assessing their most significant contributions as well as their internal contradictions and future challenges.