*Indicates open access
A selected (and incomplete) list of literary journals known for excellence in editing, fair peer review practices, and reasonable turn around times.
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Amodern is a peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal devoted to the study of media, culture, and poetics. Its purpose is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary conversations about the role of media and technology in contemporary cultural practices. We are particularly interested in those topics that normally escape scrutiny, or are ignored or excluded for whatever reason.
American Literary History covers the study of US literature from its origins through the present, providing a much-needed forum for the various, often competing voices of contemporary literary inquiry.
ASAP/Journal, the scholarly journal of The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, is a forum for groundbreaking scholarship that examines the range and significance of the visual, media, literary, architectural, and performing arts. ASAP/Journal recognizes the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art and the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of dialogue about it. We invite submission of scholarly essays that examine contemporary arts fields (literature, sculpture, film, theater, music, media art, etc.) or topics related to the intersection of these fields in art and theory. The journal welcomes essays on international arts and arts movements of any kind, unrestricted by national, ethnic, religious, or gender borders and boundaries, and is committed to exploring the full cultural and geographic diversity, as well as the creative and conceptual rigor, of the contemporary arts.
Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print. It publishes research on the social, economic, and cultural history of authorship, editing, printing, the book arts, publishing, the book trade, periodicals, newspapers, ephemera, copyright, censorship, literary agents, libraries, literary criticism, canon formation, literacy, literary education, reading habits, and reader response. Book History is the official publication of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Inc. (SHARP).
Configurations explores the relations of literature and the arts to the sciences and technology. Founded in 1993, the journal continues to set the stage for transdisciplinary research concerning the interplay between science, technology, and the arts. Configurations is the official publication of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA).
Digital Literary Studies is an international peer-reviewed interdisciplinary publication with a focus on those aspects of Digital Humanities primarily concerned with literary studies. Digital Literary Studies publishes scholarly articles on research concerned with computational approaches to literary analysis/criticism, or critical/literary approaches to electronic literature, digital media, and textual resources. In addition to longer, more traditionally-formed articles, this journal publishes positional papers and articles with a shorter experimental focus, as well as reviews of books and electronic literature. Contributors may also submit curated electronic texts for peer-review, as well as thoroughly-documented hermeneutical methods and tools. Any digital project with a literary focus, whether that be a digital edition, tool, or otherwise, may be considered for peer-review.
Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures reveals alternative modes of contact for medieval scholars, librarians and archivists specializing in Middle Ages study and Medieval texts, made possible by the emergence of digital resources and by engagement with the Digital Humanities. The Journal pushes traditional national and temporal boundaries as the first such publication linking peer-reviewed research and scholarship with the digital libraries of medieval manuscripts such as The Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts and Parker on the Web. Published twice a year, Digital Philology includes scholarly essays, manuscript studies, and reviews of relevant resources such as websites, digital projects, and books.
Digital Studies / Le champ numérique is a refereed academic journal serving as a formal arena for scholarly activity and as an academic resource for researchers in the digital humanities. DS/CN is published by the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI), a partner in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). DS/CN was founded for SDH/SEMI at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, University of Victoria, in 2008 by Ray Siemens and Christian Vandendorpe.
English Literary History (ELH) welcomes sophisticated, groundbreaking essays on all literatures in English and on cultural forms and contexts related to those literatures. Continuing a tradition that stretches back to 1934, the journal's editors balance historical, critical, and theoretical concerns in seeking to publish the very best work on English-language writing from its beginnings to the present day.
Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture is a triannual publication devoted to the study of the codes, conventions, and histories of generic forms in the context of their cultural manifestations and effects. It publishes articles that deal with questions of genre in both literary and nonliterary forms, that bring a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to genre, or that consider theoretical, institutional, or political dimensions of discourse.
Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing four times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997, it asserts that, notwithstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of materials, we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the ‘merciless criticism of everything that exists’: for us that includes Marxism itself.
Journal of Cultural Analytics is a new open-access journal dedicated to the computational study of culture. Its aim is to promote high quality scholarship that intervenes in contemporary debates about the study of culture using computational and quantitative methods.
The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to the academic study of modern periodicals—by which we mean periodicals published roughly in the period from 1880 to 1950, whether they are aggressively modernist or anti-modernist, popular or elite, mass circulation or specialized, long-lasting or brief. Daily newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and irregularly published little magazines are all part of the field covered by this journal. The journal publishes full-length articles, shorter notes and comments, bibliographies, biographical essays, review of books, digital projects, research archives, and other such significant scholarly resources.
Misinformation Review publishes high-quality, interdisciplinary research that examines misinformation from different perspectives, from its prevalence and impact to the effectiveness of possible interventions. We currently publish six regular issues per year. We also publish special issues on themes of particular relevance curated by guest editors..
Modern Philology sets the standard for literary scholarship, history, and criticism. The journal features contributions on literature in all modern world languages, including productive comparisons of texts and traditions from European and non-European literatures. Its wide editorial scope encompasses literary works, literary traditions, and literary criticism from, roughly, the time of Charlemagne to the present. MP also publishes insightful reviews of recent books as well as review articles and research on archival documents.
Modernism/modernity focuses on the methodological, archival, and theoretical approaches particular to modernist studies. It encourages an interdisciplinary approach linking music, architecture, the visual arts, literature, and social and intellectual history. The journal's broad scope fosters dialogue about the history of modernism and its relations to modernization. Each issue features a selection of essays as well as book reviews. Additional articles and other peer-reviewed formats appear on the journal's Print Plus platform (modernismmodernity.org). Modernism/modernity is the official journal of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA). Winner of six awards from CELJ.
Narrative is the official journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Narrative's broad range of scholarship includes the English, American, and European novel, nonfiction narrative, film, and narrative as used in performance art.
New Literary History focuses on questions of theory, method, interpretation, and literary history. Rather than espousing a single ideology or intellectual framework, it canvasses a wide range of scholarly concerns. By examining the bases of criticism, the journal provokes debate on the relations between literary and cultural texts and present needs. A major international forum for scholarly exchange, New Literary History has received six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
Novel is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the best new criticism and theory in novel studies. The journal took up this mission in the days of formalism and has responded to the innovative moments in the field during the half-century that has elapsed since then—including ideology critique, feminist and critical race theory, poststructuralism, cultural studies, and new historicism—by publishing the most interesting new work on the novel. As globalization and crises in biopolitics and the environment rapidly increase, and as models of affect theory multiply, the novel and how we read it are undergoing a sea change. Novel is especially interested in theory and scholarship that address these changes in terms of their formal, historical, political, and/or epistemological significance.
Philological Encounters is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the historical and philosophical critique of philology. The journal encourages critical and comparative perspectives that integrate textual scholarship and the study of language from across the world. Alongside four issues a year, monographs and/ or collected volumes will occasionally be published as supplements to the journal. The journal is open to contributions in all fields studying the history of textual practices, hermeneutics and philology, philological controversies, and the intellectual and global history of writing, archiving, tradition-making and publishing. Neither confined to any discipline nor bound by any geographical or temporal limits, Philological Encounters takes as its point of departure the growing concern with the global significance of philology and the potential of historically conscious and politically critical philology to challenge exclusivist notions of the self and the canon. Philological Encounters welcomes innovative and critical contributions in the form of articles as well as review articles, usually of two or three related books, and preferably from different disciplines.
Poetics is an interdisciplinary journal of theoretical and empirical research on culture, the media and the arts. Particularly welcome are papers that make an original contribution to the major disciplines - sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, and economics - within which promising lines of research on culture, media and the arts have been developed.
Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics. Several thematic review sections or special issues are published in each volume, and each issue contains a book review section, with article-length review essays.
Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, sponsored by the Institute for Public Knowledge. The journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks. Artists, activists, and both well-established and younger scholars, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture.
Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences publishes outstanding theoretical and critical work in the humanities and social sciences. Run by an independent group of graduate students since its founding at the University of California, Berkeley, the journal aims to start critical conversations and introduce new analytic modes by bringing together diverse scholarly and artistic voices. Contributors challenge disciplinary boundaries and engage with theoretical debates whose import stretches within and beyond the academy. Qui Parle also regularly curates special issues and dossiers organized around burgeoning intellectual topics and theoretical problems whose implications span the humanities and social sciences and reflect the varied interests of the editorial board.
Sign Systems Studies was established in 1964 by Juri Lotman (initially as Труды по знаковым системам - Σημειωτικη), and is thus the oldest international semiotic periodical. Originally (until 1992) a Russian-language series, it is now published in English, and has become a central institution in the semiotics of culture.
Social Text covers a broad spectrum of social and cultural phenomena, applying the latest interpretive methods to the world at large. A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies, the journal consistently focuses attention on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment, publishing key works by the most influential social and cultural theorists. As a journal at the forefront of cultural theory, Social Text seeks provocative interviews and challenging articles from emerging critical voices. Each issue breaks new ground in the debates about postcolonialism, postmodernism, and popular culture. Columbia's Brent Edwards and Brian Larkin are on the editorial board.
Studies in American Fiction publishes reviews and articles on a wide temporal range in American fiction: from neglected and rediscovered early U.S. writers (Susanna Rowson, Leonora Sansay, James Hall) to the emergent authors of the present day (Katherine Dunn, Ana Menéndez, Monique Truong, Toni Morrison). Expect its refereed articles to feature not only major canonical works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Thomas Pynchon, but scholarly analyses of contemporary Chicano literature and Harlem Renaissance fiction. Engendering conversations about forms of writing that do not succumb to traditional genres, SAF interrogates and redraws both generic and geographic boundaries. SAF is the only journal encompassing American literature from the North American colonial past to the United States' globalized present. Rachel Adams, Walter Benn Michaels, Louis Menand, Sianne Ngai on the Advisory board.
Studies in the Novel has staked its reputation upon publishing incisive scholarship on the canon-forming and cutting-edge novelists that have shaped the genre’s rich history. The journal continues to break new ground by promoting new theoretical approaches, a broader international scope, and an engagement with the contemporary novel as a form of social critique. The editorial vision of Studies in the Novel is informed by our tradition of showcasing fresh perspectives on canonical authors while extending our founders’ mission to highlight scholarship on novelists from around the globe. As an ongoing scholarly endeavor, Studies in the Novel is committed to the belief that there is more at stake in novelistic inquiry than the study of a literary genre. In its fullest meaning, “novel” represents the study of what is truly novel: “Of a new kind or nature; not previously imagined or thought of” (OED). As a vehicle for critical reflection and social transformation, the novel remains what it always has been: a vital source of new ways of thinking and relating to a rapidly changing world.
Style invites submissions that address questions of style, stylistics, and poetics—as we have traditionally. These submissions may include research and theory in discourse analysis, literary and nonliterary genres, narrative, figuration, metrics, and rhetorical analysis. In addition, Style also now welcomes contributions employing recent developments in several psychologies—cognition, bioevolutionary psychology, family systems, and human development—as those may relate to the study of literature and the humanities. Furthermore, the editors will be pleased to consider submissions on pedagogy generally as such relate to the teaching of literature and the humanities. Contributions may draw from such fields as literary criticism, critical theory, linguistics, philosophy of language, rhetoric, narrative, and composition studies as well as the varieties of psychologies and pedagogies.
Substance t is an international nexus for discourses converging upon literature from a variety of fields, including philosophy, the social science, science, and the arts. Readers have come to expect the unexpected from SubStance, and to experience a sense of participating in the formulation of emerging theories.
TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies endeavors to investigate the meaning and implications of textuality is designed to widen our understanding of how new developments in fields like codicology, material philology, art history, musicology and cultural studies are redefining and integrating our notions of what constitutes a text in diverse cultural contexts.
Textual Practice is Britain’s principal international journal of radical literary studies, continually pressing theory into new engagements. Today, as customary relations among disciplines and media are questioned and transformed, Textual Practice works at the turning points of theory with politics, history and texts. It is intrigued by the processes through which hitherto marginal cultures of ethnicity and sexuality are becoming conceptually central, and by the consequences of these diverse disturbances for educational and cultural institutions.