Purpose: Research on disciplinary literacy in English has struggled with how to represent large-scale disciplinary communities and consider issues of justice and power. The purpose of this study is to offer insights into the disciplinary practice of a community of literary scholars. Design/methodology/approach: Using statistical topic modeling augmented with complementary qualitative analysis and interpretive rhetorical analysis, the authors describe patterns in a corpus of 4,039 articles published in the year 2018 and drawn from 215 peer-reviewed literary journals, a corpus comprising 15.5 million words. Findings: Analysis suggests that contemporary literary scholars collectively build knowledge that considers diverse matters of form, including literary and linguistic forms, literary works and other representational forms; criticality, including critical theories and critical concepts; and humanity, including humanistic themes, human institutions and people/places. Originality/value: This manuscript offers detail about the nature of contemporary literary scholarship as evident through linguistic patterns in and across published works.