Editorial Instructions

Before submitting your articles, please make sure you take into account the following:

– Interviews and reviews will also be accepted as contributions.
– The journal needs to be stylistically coherent. It is, therefore, crucial that you make sure you comply with all the requirements outlined in the present style sheet.
– Authors should submit their papers before the deadline specified for each of the issues. Please e-mail the contributions to gcss.art.journal@gmail.com
– Submitted articles should be between 4000 and 6000 words long (including all in-text citations, footnotes and the Works Cited section).
– Submitted reviews should be between 1000 and 1500 words long.
– Each of the contributions will undergo the process of double-blind review by external reviewers.

General

  1. Use MS Word software, preferably .doc files. Pdf files will not be accepted due to problems with formatting that they may cause.
  2. In titles, etc., italics instead of underlining should be used.
  3. If the title is longer, a shortened version (up to about 50 characters – including spaces) should be suggested (to be used at the top of the subsequent pages).
  4. Please open the article with your name, font size 12, aligned right. Immediately below, please provide the name of your university (italics, font size 12).
  5. Include the title of the article in the next line. Make sure the title is centrally aligned (bold type, font size 12). Then proceed with the main body of your article.
  6. Use double quotation marks for all cases including single words, except for quotes within quotes.
  7. Please use British spelling, but –ize endings (i.e. subsidize).
  8. The number of words that are italicized or placed within quotation marks to mark a special usage of the word should be restricted to a minimum.
  9. MLA rules should be observed (consult MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th edition). The main guidelines are given below.

BASIC FORMATTING

  1. All margins should be set to 25 mm.
  2. The main body of the article should be fully justified.
  3. The text should be single-spaced. Use Times New Roman font size 12.
  4. Indent the first line of each new paragraph by 1.25 cm.
  5. Please do not put an extra line in between paragraphs.
  6. Please avoid unnecessary spaces.
  7. Please number the pages. The pagination should be placed at the bottom center of the page.
  8. Foreign words should be italicized.
  9. Please do not use a hyphen after prefixes (i.e. post-, pre-, re-, anti-, multi-, etc.).
  10. Please use en-dashes instead of em-dashes.

QUOTATIONS

Formatting quotations:

  1. Quotations from prose that are shorter than 40 words should be incorporated into the text and placed within double quotation marks.
  2. Quotations from prose that are longer than 40 words should form separate paragraphs and should be written in a smaller font – size 10. For footnotes, use size 10 as well. In the case of such quotations, the final punctuation mark precedes the parenthetical reference.
  3. Short quotations from poetry should be incorporated into the text and placed within double quotation marks. Please make sure that you indicate the separate lines by using a slash in between them. (“xxx / yyy / zzz”)
  4. Longer quotations from poetry should be blocked (please see point 2.).
  5. When providing page ranges, please give the full number for the first page, and include only the last two digits of the final page number, e.g. 1-8, 32-37, 46-59, 335-49, 409-523, etc.
  6. If you introduce a quotation in the middle of the sentence, please make sure that it starts with a lower-case letter, i.e.: Miller claims that “[t]he play touches upon a number of political issues.” not Miller claims that “The play touches upon a number of political issues.”

Omissions from quotations:

Use . . . (three full stops interspersed with spaces) to indicate an omission from a quotation: “Medical thinking . . . stressed air as the communicator of disease.”

Please make sure that you intersperse the full stops with spaces so as make it possible to differentiate between the original quotation and your omission. If this rule overlaps with the punctuation in the original source (i.e. three full stops with spaces in-between are also used in the original), please enclose your omission in square brackets ([. . .]) and add a footnote explaining that this was the reason.

Addition to a quotation:

To indicate an addition to the original quotation, please place the text that you add within square brackets. “When Bill [Jones] or I look back we see no people trying to challenge what we stand for.” Should you want to add something that precedes the quotation, please include it in the sentence instead of adding it within the quotation marks.

Quotation marks and/or inverted commas:

Except in short quotations, the final punctuation mark (comma, full stop) precedes the closing quotation marks: Shelley argued thus: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” “You’ve got to be carefully taught,” wrote Oscar Hammerstein II of racial prejudice. Semi-colons are an exception to this rule.

In-text citations:

Use parenthetical citations:

Ancient writers attributed the invention of the monochord to Pythagoras (Marcuse 197).
If the author’s name appears in the sentence, it can be omitted in the note:
Only Daiches has seen this relation (776-77).
If the work in question has two or three authors include all the names in the sentence or in the parenthesis:
Jones, Smith and Elbows claim that “….” (776-77)
“…” (Jones, Smith and Elbows 776-77)
For works with more than three authors, please provide the name of the first author followed by et al.
“…” (Burns et al. 439)
When the name of the author is not known, please use the full title in the sentence or use a shortened title in the parenthesis:
(“Money Kills” 23)
If you are quoting someone cited in a given work, please provide the name of that person within the sentence and open the parenthetical reference with qtd. in:
Adam Jones observed that “…” (qtd. in Smith 12)
If your Works Cited list includes two or more works by the given author, please indicate a shortened title of the work in question as well as author’s name. If the name does not appear in the sentence that precedes the quotation, please start the parenthetical reference with the name of the author and then use a comma and provide the title:
Huxley claims that “…” (“Article X” 13)
The author of the article claims that “…” (Huxley, “Article X” 13)

Titles:

– italics: book, newspaper, magazine, journal, film, record album, painting, sculpture, etc. (exceptions: the Bible, Old Testament, etc.);
– inverted commas: press article, essay in a book, short story, poem (in a collection), song, etc.

Titles within titles:

“Young Goodman Brown” and Hawthorne’s Puritan Heritage (book on a short story)
“As You Like It as a Pastoral Poem” (article on a play)
“An Interpretation of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’” (article on a poem)
Approaches to Teaching Dickens’ David Copperfield (book on a novel)

WORKS CITED

General information

Please remember that the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook requires you to provide information about the medium you’re using (notice “Print.” below).

  1. book:

Spark, Muriel. The Public Image. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Print.

  1. article in a scholarly journal:

Clark, Herbert H., and Thomas H. Carlson. “Hearers and Speech Acts.” Language 58 (1982): 332-373. Print.

  1. editor:

Gunn, Giles, ed. Literature and Religion. New York: Harper, 1971. Print.

  1. more than one author/editor:

Bondanella, Peter, and Julia Bondanella, eds. Dictionary of Italian Literature. Westport: Greenwood, 1979. Print.

  1. work in a collection:

by the author himself/herself:

García Márquez, Gabriel. “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” “Leaf Storm” and Other Stories. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper, 1972. 105-112. Print.

by somebody else:

O”Connor, Flannery. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” The Realm of Fiction: Seventy-Four Stories. Ed. James B. Hall and Elizabeth C. Hall. New York: McGraw, 1977. 479-488. Print.

  1. book in a series:

Bjornson, Richard, ed. Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Approaches to Teaching Masterpieces of World Literature 3. New York: MLA, 1984. Print.

Detailed guidelines (particularly useful for citing Internet sources) can be found in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.).

Some basic information may also be found on the following website: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/11/