Abstract: Humanism has long been treated as a coherent intellectual inheritance from the Renaissance, grounded in human dignity, rationality, and moral autonomy. Yet modern theory has repeatedly announced its demise. This article challenges both continuity and obsolescence narratives by arguing that literary humanism is best understood as a recurring crisis-formation rather than a stable doctrine. Across historical ruptures—the collapse of scholastic theology, Enlightenment universalism, Romantic interiority, existential disillusionment, postcolonial critique, and postmodern anti-humanism—literature repeatedly reconstructs the human subject under conditions of epistemic instability. Through sustained analysis of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Achebe, and Atwood, and in dialogue with theorists such as Paul Oskar Kristeller, Charles Taylor, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edward Said, and Martha Nussbaum, this study argues that humanism persists precisely because it is unstable. Literature does not preserve a fixed model of the human; it continually renegotiates agency, dignity, and ethical responsibility in response to historical crisis. Literary humanism survives not as ideology but as structural necessity: narrative cannot relinquish the problem of subjectivity without forfeiting its ethical function.

Keywords: Literary humanism; Renaissance subjectivity; anti-humanism; existential freedom; Enlightenment rationality; postcolonial critique; narrative agency; ethical criticism; subject formation; modern literary theory.