The aim of this article is to provide some reflections on the relevance of the concept of resilience in literary studies. It postulates the expansion of a purely survival-related concept of resilience through an ethical and aesthetic-creative dimension of sustainability, as inherent in the cultural-ecological concept of sustainable texts (Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts, Bloomsbury, London, 2016). This literary-theoretical argument is first developed in general terms and then concretized using textual examples from African-American (Toni Morrison, Beloved), Indian (Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide) and Nigerian (Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were) literature. In these novels, experiences of traumatization are activated in different ways as challenges to individual and collective survival, but also as counter-discursive sources of resistance, cultural criticism and energies of cultural regeneration. The encounter with crises in the fictional space of texts, in which possibilities of a new beginning are nevertheless repeatedly imagined in the face of extreme social and environmental boundary experiences, can strengthen the ability to deal with real crises in psychological as well as social and ethical terms. In this sense, literature can be seen as a creative resilience system of culture, which in its communicative intensity and openness to participatory reception also has the potential for transformation into sustainable (cultural) ecological practice.