For authors
The Journal of Mythology follows the MLA Handbook, 9th edition, in all matters of style, citation, and documentation.
FORMATTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT
Submit a double-spaced document in a legible 12-point serif face with one-inch margins. MLA does not use a separate title page: place your title at the top of the first page, centred, in title case and without bold, italics, quotation marks, or underlining. Number pages consecutively in the upper right.
Use italics for the titles of books, journals, films, and other standalone works, and quotation marks for articles, chapters, poems, and short works. Do not use underlining for emphasis or titles.
Set quotations of more than four lines of prose, or three lines of verse, as an indented block without quotation marks, with the parenthetical citation following the final punctuation.
CITATIONS
Use MLA 9 parenthetical citations keyed to a Works Cited list at the end. Cite by author and page — (Campbell 148) — and by author alone where the source is unpaginated. The Works Cited list is alphabetical by the first author's surname, with a hanging indent.
Invert only the first author's name. A source with two authors reads "Surname, First, and First Surname"; three or more collapses to "Surname, First, et al." Give DOIs as full https://doi.org/ addresses.
Articles in this journal are published digital-first and are not paginated, so citations of our own articles take the author-only form. Every published article page carries a ready-made MLA 9 entry you can copy.
ABSTRACT AND KEYWORDS
Submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and up to six keywords. Both are indexed and are what most readers see first, so write the abstract to stand alone: state what the piece argues, not what it will do.
PREPARING FOR ANONYMOUS REVIEW
Submissions are read anonymously. Before you send your manuscript, remove your name, affiliation, and acknowledgements from the document itself, and clear identifying information from the file's properties. Refer to your own prior work in the third person, as you would any other scholar's, rather than writing "as I argued in".
Your name and affiliation belong in the submission form, which reviewers never see. We will restore acknowledgements before publication.
LANGUAGE AND TRANSLITERATION
Write for a reader who is a scholar but not necessarily a specialist in your tradition. Gloss terms of art on first use. Give primary-source quotations in translation, with the original in parentheses or a note where the wording matters to the argument; name the translator, or state that the translation is your own. Use a consistent, recognised transliteration scheme and say which one you have used.
WHAT WE ASK FOR AT SUBMISSION
We review abstracts first. If your abstract is accepted, we will ask for the full manuscript by a stated date and send you a link for delivering it — you will not need an account to use it, though we encourage you to set one up so you can follow your submission.
