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Preparing your materials

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 

Victorian Literature and Culture seeks to publish cutting-edge scholarship of broad interest to the field, including work that challenges or interrogates the boundaries of the field itself. We are open to experiments in genre and form and welcome queries about the suitability of particular submissions. 

  • All manuscripts should be double-spaced and should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, with abbreviated footnote citations and a bibliography. (See sections 14.19 and following.) 
  • Essay manuscripts should be between 7,000 and 12,000 words. (Word length for book reviews, Defamiliarizations, etc., should be worked out in advance with the editors.) All essay submissions should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words. 
  • For blind reading purposes, the author’s name, affiliation, contact information, and competing interests declaration should appear nowhere on the submission; they should be included only in the submission email and/or Title Page. 
  • We welcome all submissions to our ScholarOne Manuscripts website at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/vlc. Submissions should be sent as Word documents. 

Special Issues: The editors of VLC welcome proposals for special issues or clusters. Proposals that include contributor names and paper abstracts will be given preference, but proposals in earlier states of development may be considered. Please send all queries to victorianlitandculture@gmail.com.

Victorian Literature and Culture is published quarterly, in March, June, September and December.

HOUSE STYLE GUIDE FOR VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
  • Please note that authors are responsible for the accuracy of all citations, dates, etc.
  • Our copyeditor will correct spacing and other basic formatting issues silently; she or he will not make any changes to punctuation, word choice, etc., that are not visible in “track changes.”
  • When you return your essay, please include:
  • An abstract of approximately 100 words.
  • An author’s bio of 50-60 words. Please provide the publication date and press for any monograph you list. For example: John Doe is the author of Victorian Literature in Our Time (Harvard, 2018).

Formatting and House Style

Our style guide is based on The Chicago Manual of Style, ed. 17 (2017).

  • Double space and use Times New Roman 12-pt. font throughout the article.
  • We prefer that you use the authoritative editions of the texts you reference unless a particular edition is key to your argument; if no authoritative edition exists, modern edited editions such as Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics are acceptable, as are original editions.
  • Use American spellings.
  • Hyphens are unnecessary for typical prefixes (e.g., re-, non-, un-, etc.), unless the word being modified is capitalized (e.g., neo-Victorian). If unsure whether a compound word is hyphenated, refer to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.
  • Provide the first names of historical individuals the first time you reference them.
  • All quotations of 100 or more words or two or more lines of poetry should be set off from the body of the essay in a block quotation. The entire quotation should be indented .5 inches.
  • Endnotes should follow Chicago guidelines for shortened notes. For example, an endnote citation of a work listed in the Works Cited as: Ablow, Rachel, and Daniel Hack. “Keywords.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 547–50. would look like this: Ablow and Hack, “Keywords,” 549. (Further examples can be found here.) Online publication is moving away from the use of “Ibid.,” so please repeat shortened citation information.
  • Endnotes will appear in a “Notes” section after the article text. If an acknowledgment is included, it should come before the first note.
  • When using italics in quotations, indicate “emphasis original” or “emphasis mine” in parentheses after the page number in the citation.
  • When citing poetry, when possible refer to line and/or division instead of page number.
  • If you quote from a text more than four times, provide an endnote for the first quotation but follow the citation with this phrase: “All subsequent references to this edition are noted parenthetically in the text.” Note subsequent references parenthetically in the text.
  • Works Cited should appear at the end of the essay, in the same document. You can put this section before the Endnotes, if that’s easier for you.
    • Be sure to include the entire page range for journal articles.
    • Do not include state names with the place of publication. Example: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. [NJ not needed.]
    • Please use only the primary place of publication. Example: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. [Not: Oxford and New York]

Illustrations

  • VLC encourages illustrations. However, responsibility for providing illustrative material and any necessary permissions and associated fees rests with the author of the article. Permission letters may need to be obtained from the copyright owners, and, if required, permission acknowledgment should be included at the end of each caption.
  • VLC accepts digital images, as tiffs or jpegs, with at least 300 dpi. Please save these files as your last name and the number of the illustration as it appears in your text (for example “ONeill3”). Images sent via email are preferred. If you find that the file is too large for your email account, you can share it via Google Drive or Dropbox. These should be separate files and should not appear in text.
  • Text references to numbered illustrations follow Chicago 17. At the appropriate point within the body of the text, identify the illustration with the word “figure” in roman, lowercase and spelled out “as in figure 1” with the exception of parenthetical references: “(fig. 10).” In your text, please do not refer to the figure as “the figure opposite” or the figure above,” etc., as the final placement of the illustration may not appear this way.
  • Indicate approximately where you’d like the figure to appear in text by typing “Figure 1.” followed by the caption after a complete paragraph. For captions, please provide size, medium, and location where suitable. If there is more than one illustration, each should be numbered in the order in which it is to appear. (If you have any special instructions for the typesetter, this is where you can include those. Please bold them and put them in brackets [] after the caption.) See CMOS 17, chapter 3, for citation and caption guidelines.

If you have any questions, please contact Rachel Ablow and Daniel Hack at victorianlitandculture@gmail.com.

Competing interests declaration

All authors must include a competing interests declaration in their submission email and/or Title Page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article. Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations. If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors. Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.

ORCID

Victorian Literature and Culture now requires that all corresponding authors identify themselves using their ORCID iD when submitting a manuscript to the journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

  • Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you’ve authored.
  • Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
  • Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

If you don’t already have an iD, you’ll need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to Victorian Literature and Culture. You can register for one directly from your user account on Scholar One or via https://ORCID.org/register. If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting, either by linking it to your Scholar One account or supplying it during submission by using the “Associate your existing ORCID ID” button.