Submissions

Author Guidelines

What ARIEL Looks For in an Article: Guidelines for Authors

Subject Matter & Scope

ARIEL began as a study of the literature of former British colonies, what was then known as “Commonwealth” literature, scrutinizing, as Pamela McCallum, a past editor, put it, the “complex critical, passionate and sometimes troubled dialogues with the ‘great tradition’ of literature in English.” Under the editorships of Ian Adam and Victor Ramraj during the 1980s and 1990s, ARIEL reinvented itself as a journal of postcolonial criticism and took up the questions this new field of inquiry raised. Over the past 10 years or so, the journal has expanded its parameters to engage with the newly emergent field of globalization and cultural studies while carrying forward its established legacies, addressing issues such as globalization and Indigenism, citizenship, translational and transcultural identity, interaction between the global and the local, and the new forms and sites of exploitation and colonization in the age of transnational capitalism. While continuing to be interested in articles that engage with questions like how postcolonial literature “writes back” to the canonical, imperial, or metropolitan centers, we wish the journal to grow in globalization studies. We would also like to invite scholars who are interested in hemispheric studies and diaspora studies to contribute to the journal; these fields of inquiry have used insights generated by postcolonial theorists—and sometimes reacted against them—to illuminate authors and regions that would not have originally qualified as “postcolonial.”

Method & Critical Engagement

We are especially pleased with articles that work on multiple levels, with articles that do not just offer a close reading of a text or set of texts but that use that close reading to intervene in a scholarly conversation. The conversation might be local: for example, it might involve what the text has been interpreted to be about or the possibilities it offers for political resistance or the way the text has been categorized or the text’s relationship to a larger body of work.  Or the conversation might have to do with a methodological question or theoretical claim. These conversations are not, of course, mutually exclusive. The best articles often contribute simultaneously to our understanding of particular texts as well as methodological or theoretical debates.

One of the questions we ask readers when they assess an article for publication in ARIEL is this: “What does this article contribute to the field?” It is not enough that an article performs this intervention implicitly; instead, we ask that authors be explicit about which scholarly conversation(s) they are engaging with and the form their intervention(s) takes.  In other words, how does the article change the world of existing interpretation? We do not require that whole cities be razed or new land masses arise, but somehow the vista must be a little bit different once the reader has finished the article.

The “Perspectives” Section

ARIEL sometimes publishes shorter articles that do not make the kind of scholarly intervention that we expect of a regular article. Instead, these articles do one of the following:

• They introduce our readers to an author or body of work that has not received much critical attention;
• They make a minor scholarly intervention by offering a careful close reading of a brief passage from a canonical or important text;
• They address postcolonial dramatic performances;
• They offer a valuable alternative to conventional academic scholarship by representing a genuinely new perspective on familiar material or an attempt to take scholarly conversation in new directions without the apparatus of traditional scholarship (e.g., heavy citation).

If you would like your article to be considered for our “Perspectives” section, please indicate that to the editors during the submission process and make sure your essay conforms to the length requirements for this kind of article (see below).

Global Pedagogy

ARIEL invites articles addressing the practice, effects, and implications of teaching literature in English in global contexts. In particular, we seek articles exploring the following issues or related issues:

• How is English pedagogy being reinvented in the contemporary global milieu? What new methods and assumptions are forming around the teaching of literature in English?
• How is the teaching of literature in English shaped by different cultural contexts and student audiences? How has the global teaching of literature in English changed over time in response to different local and global pressures and paradigms?
• What are the effects of the increasing global migra­tion of students and institutions of higher learning on the discipline of English?
• How is contemporary pedagogy constrained or shaped by the economic and institutional forces driving globalization?
• What is the relationship between institutions of higher learning, nation-states, and multinational corporations, and how do these relationships affect the teaching of literature? Does the discipline of English serve or challenge the interests of national governments, multinational corporations, and cultural hegemony?
• In what ways is the global dissemination of literature a benign or even productive form of cross-cultural interaction, in what ways is it a form of cultural imperialism, and in what ways is it a form of resistance to cultural imperialism?

Interviews

ARIEL publishes interviews with relevant authors and critics. If you have an interview you would like us to consider, please submit it to us the way you would an article but let us know that it’s an interview.

In order to help the editors review the submission, please include in the abstract information about existing interviews of the author, if any, how the new interview differs from existing ones, and why it’s important to publish another interview of the author or critic.

Interviews should contain the following information in an introduction:

• a brief biography of the person interviewed (their accomplishments, the occasion that prompted the interview if appropriate, etc.);
• an explanation of what is of interest in the interview to readers of ARIEL and/or to postcolonial or related studies at the moment. The introduction should provide a hook to our readers, in other words, and it should justify publication in a journal devoted to postcolonial studies and related fields;
• what form the interview took (whether verbal or via e-mail), and when the interview took place;
• any other pertinent information.

Book Reviews

The standard length of an ARIEL review is 800-1200 words (excluding the Works Cited). We also occasionally publish review essays, which cover approximately three texts and are 1800-2200 words in length (excluding the Works Cited). Reviews should engage substantially with the book(s) under review, summarizing the main arguments in an evaluative fashion, noting key points, and situating it/them within the field. If you would like more information on writing and submitting a book review, contact the Reviews Editor directly. Please note that unsolicited book reviews are not accepted.

• Inquiries concerning book reviews should be sent to the Reviews Editor, Henghameh Saroukhani.
  
  
• Books for review should be sent directly to our ARIEL office:
  
  ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature
  Department of English
  University of Calgary
  2500 University Drive NW
  Calgary AB Canada T2N 1N4
  
  

Article Length and Abstract

Articles should be between 6000 and 9000 words (17-25 pages), Perspective pieces between 3000 and 4500 words (8-13 pages), global pedagogy essays between 3500 and 9000 words (8-25 pages), interviews between 1500 and 3600 words (5-12 pages), and reviews between 800-1200 words (3-5 pages. The word and page counts do not include works cited and notes. If you are submitting an article or Perspectives or global pedagogy piece, we also ask you to include five keywords and an abstract. 

For details on how to write an effective abstract, please consult this article: Writing an Effective Abstract: An Audience-Based Approach.

And for some strategies on writing an effective introduction, please see the following: Writing Effective Journal Introductions.

Policies

• All articles are subject to anonymous refereeing (authorship unattributed and readers unidentified); consequently, names of contributors and author(s) should not appear anywhere in the manuscript, e.g., not on a title page or in running headers, etc.
• The editors require assurance that authors are not offering their articles concurrently elsewhere. If you decide to submit it elsewhere while it is under review with us, you will need to let us know immediately so we can pull your article from consideration.
• We aim to take no more than five months for a decision on a submission. However, in cases where it is difficult to find willing evaluators in the field of the essay, decisions can take longer. Feel free to e-mail us for an update if you have not heard from us within five months.
• The editors reserve the right to amend phrasing and punctuation in articles and reviews accepted for publication. When we deem more extensive editing is required, the editors will ask the author for approval.
• ARIEL acknowledges the usefulness of grammar and spellcheck programs that use AI. Authors are thus permitted to use such programs. AI is also permitted for polishing prose, although it is neither expected nor required for that purpose. ARIEL works closely with authors to polish their work before publication. If you have used AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) for any other purpose, we ask that you describe in detail how you’ve used such software. The ARIEL editors will decide on a case-by-case basis whether the use of AI or LLMs meets the standard of original academic work.*

Formatting

• Please submit attachments as Microsoft Word Files or rich text format only to avoid delays. If you submit an article in e-file, ARIEL assumes that you consent to its circulation to readers as an e-file.
• Please insert page numbers for each page.
• Submissions should follow the current edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers or The MLA Style Manual. See below for examples of bibliographic entries. ARIEL now requires bibliographies to conform to MLA 9^th edition. For an overview of those changes, please see https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/22/.
• Translations should be provided for citations in languages other than French.
• Please provide us with your telephone, e-mail address, and street address.

SAMPLE FORMAT:

Parenthetical or embedded citation:
One aim of LeClair's study is to "open up . . . the loop of academic discussion" (xiii) which tends "to privilege poststructuralist paradigms in its definitions of the postmodern" (23; emphasis added).

WORKS CITED:

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. Oxford UP, 1987. 

Henderson, Gwendolyn Mae. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogues, Dialects, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing on Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers UP, 1989, pp. 125-37. 

Fee, Margery. "Resistance and Complicity in David Dabydeen's The Intended." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 24, no. 1, 1993, pp. 107-25.

Yardley, Jim. "Olympic Games Begin in Beijing." The New York Times, 8 Aug. 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/world/asia/08iht-09china-web.15110615.html.

Special Issue Proposals

If you would like ARIEL to consider a guest-edited special issue, please send a proposal, addressed to the editors, describing the special issue to ariel@ucalgary.ca. Special issue proposals should include the following:

• a detailed explanation or justification for the topic of the special issue, including its relevance to ongoing debates in postcolonial or related studies;
• a list of any existing journal special issues or books (including edited essay collections) on the topic, with an explanation of how the proposed special issue differs from those existing collections;
• an explanation of how you plan to solicit contributions (will you rely on invitations or a general call for papers or both?);
• a list of potential articles if you’ve already solicited contributions, with brief abstracts and biographies of contributors;
• a brief CV for the guest editor(s).

Guest editors should be aware that, if the special issue is accepted, contributions to special issues are reviewed by external readers; please do not guarantee publication to prospective contributors. Copyediting for special issues is handled by ARIEL staff.

*The author is fully responsible for the entirety of their work. They must ensure that it is original, accurate, does not plagiarize others’ work, and appropriately cites and references others’ work. The author accepts full responsibility and is solely accountable for any liability that may ensue from the unacceptable use of AI or LLMs.