Submission Guidelines
As a publication of the International Comparative Literature Association, Recherche Littéraire / Literary Research has the mission of informing comparative literature scholars worldwide of recent contributions to the field. To that end it publishes reviews of noteworthy books on comparative topics, information about events of major significance for comparatists, and occasional position papers on issues of interest to the field. It should be emphasized that RL/LR does not publish comparative literary scholarship.
Reviews are normally written in French or English, the two official languages of the ICLA, though exceptions will be considered within the limits allowed by the editor’s resources. Reviews generally fall into one of the following three categories: book notes of 500 to 800 words for short or relatively specialized works, reviews of 1,200 to 1,500 words for longer works of greater scope, and review essays of 2,000 to 3,000 words for a work of major significance for the field or for joint treatment of several related works. Given the importance of collaborative work in promoting broad-based comparative scholarship, RL/LR does review well-conceived edited volumes, including special issues of journals, and will publish somewhat longer reviews of such scholarship when the situation merits.
Contributors need to take the needs of an international audience of comparatists into account. Reviews should therefore be readable, informative, and judicious. They need to be readable so that they will be accessible to a general comparatist readership, not just to specialists who are researching that specific topic. Reviews have to be informative, because although comparatists share a wide, cross-cultural interest in the verbal arts, they have no specific subject matter in common. Reviews should be judicious, because to gain a broader sense of their field our readers need a reasoned, thoughtful evaluation of (for example) how the work in question approaches its subject, what it adds to our knowledge, and whether important issues remain that would repay further study.
Before undertaking to write a review, prospective contributors should inform the editor of their plans at figueira@uga.edu. The reviews themselves should be sent as e-mail attachments to the same address, without extra formatting of the kind that must be found and removed during the publication process. Should e-mail contact be impossible, address all correspondence to:
Dorothy Figueira
Editor, RL/LR
University of Georgia
121 Joseph Brown Hall
Athens, Georgia 30602-6204
USA
Also available in: French
