All editorial correspondence and manuscripts of articles offered for publication should be sent to:
John Thieme
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
English and American Studies
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
Email: JohnAThieme@gmail.com
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature publishes articles on all aspects of Commonwealth and postcolonial literature and related areas, such as postcolonial theory, translation studies, colonial discourse, diaspora studies and literary responses to globalization. It welcomes submissions (in English) on writing in languages other than English. JCL's preferred length for articles is 6000-7000 words. It does not publish creative writing or book reviews, though the articles issues do include a Books Received section, which provides short notices of books sent to the Journal.
Potential authors may approach the Editor informally for advice on the suitability of a topic in advance of submission.
Electronic submission is preferred, either as a Word file on disk or as an e-mail attachment, with the proviso that hard copy has to be substituted if they are not immediately readable. If hard copy manuscripts must be submitted, two copies should be provided. Documents should be double spaced, with generous margins.
A paper is accepted on the understanding that it is an original piece of work which has not been submitted for publication elsewhere.
On acceptance of a manuscript for publication it is understood that the author(s) are thereby transferring the copyright (including the right to publish in any and all media) to the publisher.
The following is a guide to some of the main aspects of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature's house-style. For guidance on our conventions on other points, please refer to any post-1992 articles of the Journal.
Headings
Should include the title of the article, the author's name, institutional affiliation (if appropriate) and location, set out as follows:
A Sport of Nature: Gordimer's Work in Progress
Richard Smyer
The University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Text
In the body of the text all paragraphs, except the first, should be indented five spaces, and all quotations of more than three lines should be indented ten spaces and single-spaced. Indented quotations should not be given in quotation marks. Short quotations, which appear within the body of the text, should be given within double quote marks; single quote marks should only be used for quotations within quotations. Where a quotation is contained within a sentence, the full stop should normally come after the quote marks which indicate the end of the quotation; where the quotation is itself a sentence or longer, the final full stop should come before the end of the quote marks.
Book titles should be italicized. Titles of articles, short stories, poems (and other parts of books) should be given in double quotation marks.
JCL follows British rather than American spelling conventions, but for words ending -ise/-ize, the Journal usually employs the '-ize' form, e.g. 'colonize', 'civilize'.
Citations
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature uses end-notes presented as a continuous numbered sequence (relating to superscript numbers in the text), not footnotes (i.e. notes at the foot of pages) or a 'Works Cited' format. Articles which are acceptable in other respects but do not conform to this procedure will normally have to be resubmitted.
Citation details should be given as follows:
Books: author's name, title (in italics), place of publication, publisher, year of publication, page reference(s) preceded by 'p.' or (if plural) 'pp.', e.g.: Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock, London: Faber, 1960, pp. 94-5. [Please note the use of commas and the colon between place of publication and publisher.]
Articles: author's name, article title (in double inverted commas), journal title (in italics), vol. and issue no., year (in brackets), page reference (not preceded by 'p.' or 'pp.', e.g. Anthony Boxill, "V.S. Naipaul's Starting Point", Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 10,1 (1975), 1-9.
Editors' names should be indicated by 'ed.' -- or eds.' (if more than one).
For web addresses:
ICANN, About ICANN (24 July 2002). Retrieved 21 August 2002 at http:/www.icann.org/general/abouticann.htm
Repeated citations
Where a text is being cited frequently throughout an article, only one initial endnote reference should be included, together with an indication that this edition will be referred to subsequently, e.g. “Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock, London: Faber, 1960, pp. 94-5. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.”
'ibid.' (not capitalized) should be used to indicate a citation which is identical to the previous note; 'ibid.' and the appropriate page number to indicate another reference to the text cited in the previous note, but to a different page number, e.g. ibid., pp. 94-5.
Second and subsequent references to texts which do not follow on from immediately preceding footnotes should normally be indicated by titles only (abbreviated if appropriate), e.g. Palace of the Peacock, pp. 94-5, or Palace, pp. 94-5, rather than op. cit., pp. 94-5.
'Cf.' may be used to indicate 'compare', but 'See' should be used when this is the intended meaning.
Offprints
Authors will receive a complimentary journal copy. A maximum of 5 journal copies will be supplied for multi-authored articles. These will be supplied to the main author. And an electronic link to reproduce 25 offprints of their article.
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