Victorian Studies House Style Sheet for Authors

 

Victorian Studies house style generally follows the latest edition of the MLA Handbook, so please use that reference for matters concerning works cited, parenthetical references, and other issues of documentation. 

However, there are some idiosyncrasies, so we ask that you read the below guidelines carefully.

 

Formatting

 

• Times New Roman, 12 pt font, double-spaced with standard one-inch margins.
• Refer only to those secondary sources most integral to your essay and include a works cited page in MLA style—even for secondary sources that you only mention or paraphrase.
• Use as few explanatory endnotes as possible.
• In-text citations are for direct quotations ONLY. All other citations, if they are still absolutely necessary, belong in endnotes. Citations for direct quotations in the body of the essay should be parenthetical, as in: (Dickens 55). When paraphrasing or otherwise referring to primary and critical sources without a direct quote, please put the citation in an endnote and phrase it in a manner such as: “See Briggs 134”).
• In line with current MLA style, please refrain from using quotation marks for special emphasis (sometimes referred to as “scare quotes”). At VS, we prefer to rely on the author’s tone, style, and choice of words to convey meaning.
• Where applicable, please place commas and periods inside of quotation marks.
• Do not use underline (unless the underline is original to a quotation you are using).
• Please do not use italics for emphasis like this.

 

Nondiscriminatory Language

 

• Our house style uses language that includes all sexes. We suggest the use of “humanity” or “humankind” for “mankind,” “workers,” for “workmen,” “compatriots,” for “countrymen,” “they” for "he or she," and so forth. We realize, however, that in some historical contexts, gender-specific language cannot be avoided.
• The journal capitalizes “Black” as an adjective to describe members of the African diaspora. As a general practice, the journal discourages the use of a capital letter for the racialized identity marker “white.” See also CMOS, most recent 18th edition, section 8.39. Terms such as “Black” or “white” are used as adjectives with a relevant noun, not as identificatory nouns in and of themselves: “Black readers,” “white printers,” etc.
• Use of the terms “slave," "slaveholder," or “master” as nouns is not supported in final manuscripts, and where possible, we discourage their adjectival useage, as in "slave narrative." Writers might use adjectives such as “enslaved,” “captive,” “stolen,” “self-liberated/emancipated,” or others. Terms such as “enslaving/enslaver,” “profiteering,” or others should be used to describe the practices of the enslaving class.
• Following ethnic studies conventions, writers might choose to use “Latinx” to describe members of Latino/a communities. Writers might also use “Latine” (more common in non-English scholarship). As always, specificity is encouraged (“Cuban American”; “Mayan”; “Columbian”; etc).

 

Names

 

• Upon your first reference to any person, always include their full name, using surnames thereafter.

 

Dates

 

• After the first reference to any text or artwork, please include the original date of publication.
  • Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), and John Everett Millais’s The Vale of Rest (1858).
• In referring to a decade, please use numbers rather than spelling it out: 1880s or ’80s rather than “eighteen eighties."
• When citing years within the same century, repeat only the last two digits: 1857–59.

 

Citing Articles, Sections of Books, or Poems

 

• When citing an article, an edited collection, or only part of a book (e.g. Introduction, Epilogue, etc.), please include the page range in the Works Cited entry. It is often difficult to obtain this information after the fact, and sometimes means recalling books from the library.
• When citing a multi-volume work, please include Works Cited entries only for the volumes from which you cite.
• If you cite from more than one volume of the same work within your essay, please indicate which volumes you are citing from in your in-text citations (e.g. Smith 1:425).
• In parenthetical citations of poetry, please use line numbers rather than page numbers (lines 10–12).
• For two-digit page numbers, repeat the entire number: 45–48
• For three-digit page numbers (or more), repeat only the last two numbers: 203–04 or 6,518–36.

 

Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

 

Please follow MLA 9 guidelines for citing magazines and scholarly publications. That is, works cited entries for magazines published weekly or monthly, like Punch, should include the day, month, and year the issue was published, in addition to the page number or range. Volume (vol.) and issue number (no.) should be provided in place of a calendar date for scholarly journals only.

 

Extracts (Block Quotes)

 

Quoted passages of more than 4 typed lines of prose, or more than 2 typed lines of poetry, should be set off from the text by indenting them 1 inch from the left margin. Extracts should be double-spaced like the rest of the text, have no quotation marks, and should be punctuated before (not after) the parenthetical citation.

 

Foreign Words         

 

It is not necessary to italicize foreign expressions that can be found in an American dictionary, such as status quo, raison d’être, laissez-faire, fin-de-siècle, tour de force, or cliché. Within the text, [sic] is permitted.

 

Works Cited

 

Refer to the MLA 9 Handbook for details; remember that when citing an essay, a short story, a poem, or another work that appears within an anthology or some other book collection, you must include the page range of that work.

• Mill, John Stuart. “On Liberty.” Essential Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by Max Lerner, Bantam, 1965, pp. 253–360.

 

Images

 

• Do not include any images in the body of your document.
• To reference an image in-text, use the format: (fig. 1). Place the caption on a new line at the end of the paragraph where the parenthetical reference appears.
  
• We will need high-resolution scanned electronic copies of images, scanned in color, with the “descreening” filter on. Images must be at least 300 dpi to be usable by our press and preferably in .tiff.

 

Punctuation

 

• Quotation marks are placed after commas and periods, but before semi-colons.
• An Oxford comma is placed before “and” in a series: Trollope, Eliot, and Thackeray.
• Semicolons are used between independent clauses not linked by a conjunction; for example: Bill Sikes covers Nancy’s corpse with a cloth after he murders her; still, he is unable to endure the thought of her eyes watching him.
• Semicolons are used between items in a list/series only when (1) the items contain commas or other such internal punctuation or (2) in a parenthetical list of surnames.
• Ellipses are used to indicate omissions from quoted material. Three periods, with a space before and after each one ( . . . ), indicate an omission of text within the same sentence.
• When the omission spans more than one sentence, insert a period (as usual) followed by the ellipsis. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the final chapter of Brontë’s Villette (1853):
  • Let it be theirs to conceive . . . the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life. . . . Farewell.
•  When omitting material from individual lines of poetry that are presented as extracts, follow the rules above. If, however, you wish to signify entirely omitted lines or stanzas, insert a bracketed row of periods roughly the length of the lines of poetry.
• Pay attention to the difference between em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and hyphens (-). Use en dashes between numbers/date ranges.

 

Titles

 

• Please italicize the titles of works published independently (such as books, plays, long poems published as books, pamphlets, periodicals, instrumental music compositions, paintings, and works of sculpture).
• Use quotation marks for the titles of works published within larger works (articles, essays, short stories, poems, etc.).
• Please note: The titles of newspapers and periodicals are italicized, including the article when part of the original title (per MLA 9), i.e., The Pall Mall Gazette.