Genre Asymmetry and Diasporic Meaning in English-Language Literary Scholarship: Poetry, Fiction, and Critical Attention, 2000-2025

Abstract

This PRISMA-informed qualitative thematic review examines recurring patterns in a selective corpus of English-language literary scholarship published from 2000 to 2025 across poetry, fiction, life writing, and performance. Rather than claiming a statistically representative survey of the entire field, it analyzes scholarship itself as an organized pattern of critical attention. The article codes 20 English-language literary-critical publications selected through a transparent screening pathway, supported by three methodological guidance texts. By foregrounding English-language literary criticism as the object of analysis, the article contributes to English literary studies, genre studies, and transnational literary scholarship. Five first-order clusters structure the coded corpus: identity and belonging (13/20), form, genre, and performance (8/20), memory and counter-history (7/20), language and translation (6/20), and embodiment, gender, and queer relationality (3/20). Framework coding suggests the continued centrality of postcolonial criticism, while memory studies and translation-oriented approaches become increasingly visible after 2017. The review's main contribution is descriptive and interpretive: within this bounded corpus, fiction and life writing are most often used to render diasporic experience socially intelligible and historically narratable, whereas poetry and spoken word tend to foreground formal, sonic, embodied, and multilingual dimensions. The article therefore identifies recurring genre-specific functions and an uneven distribution of critical attention without presenting these patterns as exhaustive measures of English-language diaspora scholarship.