Climate change and literary imagination: A systematic review of ecocritical scholarship

Climate change is also a crisis of narrative, scale, perception, and moral imagination. This PRISMA 2020- and PRISMA-S-aligned qualitative systematic review maps English-language literary-climate scholarship published from 2000 to 2025. Searches run in Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection on 1 July 2026 identified 1866 records; 407 duplicates and 235 ineligible document types were removed, leaving 1224 records for screening and 375 database reports for eligibility assessment. Core-journal hand-searching and citation chasing identified 20 candidates: two duplicated database records, three reports could not be retrieved, and 15 new studies were included. After second-coder reconciliation and two corrected database eligibility decisions, the final synthesis comprised 173 studies. Most studies were published in 2020–2025 (138; 79.8%). Novels/climate fiction formed the largest literary category (104; 60.1%), climate criticism was the largest theoretical orientation (64; 37.0%), interpretive textual/theoretical analysis was the main method (121; 69.9%), and climate fiction and futurity was the dominant theme (115; 66.5%). The review identifies substantial growth and methodological diversification, while also showing persistent linguistic, geographic, and generic asymmetries.