Author guidelines

We ask that all contributions be submitted as MS Word documents. They should be double-spaced throughout, with standard margins of 2.5 cm in Times New Roman, 12 point font. Longer quoted passages (three lines or more) should also be double-spaced and should be indented two tabs from the left margin. Please do not justify right margins. The standard length of an academic essay is between 5,000 and 8,000 words, and this includes notes and bibliography.
Please refer to the MHRA Style Guide, 3rd edition, for full details on preparing your manuscript for publication. Unless otherwise specified below, contributions to JEPS should follow all spelling, punctuation, formatting, and referencing conventions set out in the MHRA Style Guide. It is available to download free of charge here.

The editors expect authors to have double-checked all quotations and other references to primary and secondary sources for accuracy before submission of their MS.
Where possible and subject to constraints of space, JEPS aims to reproduce illustrations with essays. When submitting your essay for consideration, you should provide low-resolution copies of figures with captions in a separate Word file. If your essay is accepted for publication, images will need to be submitted as JPEG files scanned to at least 300 dpi. At that point, you will need to provide full details about each illustration, including complete publication data and permissions.
Please note in particular the following points.

1. Quotations
Single quotation marks are used to indicate directly cited material. Double quotation marks are used to indicate a quotation within another quotation. Other uses of quotation marks (e.g. ‘scare quotes’) follow this same principle.
When short quotations are integrated into the main body of a sentence, additional punctuation is placed outside the quotation marks. This applies even when short quotations are used at the end of a sentence. Only when a quotation is a full sentence in its own right and is introduced by a comma or colon should the final full stop appear inside the closing quotation marks.

2. General References
JEPS uses footnote referencing, NOT the author-date (Harvard) system. References should be indicated by an Arabic superscript numeral in the text, inserted using the reference function in Word. Reference numbers should usually appear at the end of the sentence and always after a punctuation mark. The number of footnotes should be limited as per section 10.2 of the MHRA Style Guide.
The first footnote reference to a particular source should be given as a full reference (see section 11.2). Subsequent references should be abbreviated to the author’s surname only (see section 11.3). In cases where more than one publication by the same author is referred to in the article, the abbreviated form of reference should also include an abbreviated version of the title.

3. References to Periodical Publications
References to periodical publications should follow the format below, where volume (12) and issue number (3) are given before the date of publication which appears in parentheses. The date should normally be given accurate to the individual issue. The page range of the item is given without ‘pp.’ followed by the specific page reference in parentheses.

Jean Paul Sartre, ‘The Case for a Responsible Literature’, Partisan Review, 12.3 (Summer 1945), 304–08 (p. 305)

In cases where the issue number runs consecutively and independently from the volume or year, it may be given without the volume number. In these cases the following format should be used.

Elsa Triolet, ‘Pour l’amour de l’avenir’, Les lettres françaises, no. 955 (7 December 1962), 1

In the case of daily newspapers, the date alone may be used without issue or volume number. In these cases the date should appear in parentheses, but without a preceding comma, after the title of the publication.
In titles of English-language publications, an initial definite article is not included in the title and not italicized. So authors should refer, for example to the Criterion or the News of the World. In languages other than English an initial definite article is integrated into the publication title, as in the case of Les lettres françaises or Die neue Rundschau. Capitalization in titles follows the conventions of the language of the publication concerned.

4. Bibliography
Academic essays should also include an alphabetical bibliography, as per section 11.6. Other than the name of the first author/editor, which is inverted, and the specific page reference, which is omitted, the full bibliographic reference follows the conventions set out in section 11.2.

5. Hyperlinks
Rather than typing out URLs or DOIs in full, authors are encouraged to embed online references as hyperlinks into the names of resources, publications etc.

6. Other

  • Sentences should be separated by only one space.
  • JEPS uses –ize spellings rather than –ise.
  • In lists of three or more items, the final item should be preceded by a comma.
  • All contractions should be spelt out in full.
  • Foreign words or expressions should be italicized only if they have not entered normal English usage.
  • Short dashes (en dash) should be used to indicate a page range; long dashes (em dash) should be used — if absolutely necessary — for parenthetic phrases.
  • Names ending in –s take a full apostrophe ‘s’ to indicate possession (e.g. ‘Philpotts’s spurious argumentation’).
  • Numbers should be spelt out up to, and including, one hundred.
  • Dates should be given in the following format: 15 November 1973.
  • In ranges of numbers, including years, the final two digits should be given, even where the penultimate digit is repeated (e.g. 13–15, 44–47, 100–22, 104–08, 1933–39).