The Blue Humanities: Representations of Oceans, Rivers, and Aquatic Ecosystems in English Literature

Abstract

Water covers most of the planet's surface, yet literary studies has historically privileged terrestrial and pastoral settings, a bias that scholars have labelled “chlorophilia.” Since Steve Mentz's 2009 coinage of “blue cultural studies,” an interdisciplinary field known as the Blue Humanities has emerged to reposition oceans, rivers, and aquatic ecosystems at the centre of literary-critical inquiry. This paper presents a systematic literature review, conducted according to the PRISMA 2020 protocol, of English-language scholarship on the literary representation of water. Following a structured search of Scopus, Web of Science, the MLA International Bibliography, and JSTOR, 1,218 records were identified, of which 20 met the eligibility criteria for full synthesis. The review maps these studies across three descriptive dimensions — publication period, aquatic-ecosystem focus, and theoretical approach — using tables, a PRISMA flow diagram, and bar-chart visualisations. Findings indicate a marked and accelerating scholarly turn toward oceanic and maritime literature since 2019, organised chiefly around Blue Humanities, critical oceanic studies, material ecocriticism, and hydrofeminist frameworks; by contrast, river- and freshwater-centred literary criticism remains comparatively underdeveloped within the indexed Anglophone corpus, appearing only as a secondary strand within cross-cutting “planetary water” scholarship. The review concludes that a more geographically and ecologically balanced Blue Humanities — one that treats rivers as literary subjects in their own right rather than as tributaries of oceanic thought — represents the field's most pressing frontier.