Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies

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We welcome essays and notes on the life, associates, works, reputation, and influence of Herman Melville (1819–1891). Poetry and short fiction are also accepted. Articles typically range from 6000 to 7000 words; shorter pieces from 2500 to 4000 words. Contributors should submit articles, following the MLA Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, with parenthetical citations linked to a final list of “Works Cited.” Leviathan’s particular style guidelines can be found below.

All submissions should be made through the journal’s electronic editorial site: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/leviathan. New users will need to create an account. Along with critical interpretation, we welcome manuscript, textual, and bibliographical analysis; digital scholarship; interviews with current writers, artists, and performers; pedagogical studies; and suggestions for special issues.

Queries may be sent to the Editor (Brian Yothers), Professor and Chair, Department of English, Saint Louis University, 1 N. Grand Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63103 brian.yothers@slu.edu;  Book Review Editor (Paul Hurh), Department of English P.O. Box 210067, Modern Languages 445 University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721 jphurh@email.arizona.edu;  or Extracts Editor (Mary K. Bercaw Edwards), University of Connecticut, Avery Point Campus, 1084 Shennecossett Road, Groton, CT 06340 mary.bercaw_edwards@uconn.edu.

Melville Society Extracts, formerly the Society's newsletter, now appears in each issue of Leviathan as a separate department, called "Extracts." This section of the journal features cultural news, conference paper abstracts, keynote speeches and other materials from the Society’s biennial international conferences, and reports about Melville-related programs and events.

General correspondence and matters concerning Melville Society programs, including the Cultural Project centered at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, should be addressed to the Executive Secretary (Dawn Coleman), dcolema7@utk.edu​. Please visit the Melville Society website at http://melvillesociety.org/. News can be sent to our Web Editor (Carie Schneider) at cschneid@cameron.edu.

Submissions to Leviathan are received electronically through our online editorial site: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/leviathan. Once you have set up an account, please keep your user ID and password in a safe place as you will need them throughout the editing and production process. These revised guidelines supersede earlier submission guidelines and precedents in issues of the journal before 16.3 (Oct. 2014). 

FORMAT: In preparing your essay for submission, please follow these guidelines:

• Remove your name from your title page, running heads, footers, or any text or footnotes that might reveal your identity to our peer reviewers.
• Keep essays at no more than 7000 words (including endnotes); shorter pieces should not exceed 4000 words.
• Double-space all text, including block quotations.
• Do not use tabs or single spacing to create block quotations, stanzas of poetry, or indentations in your Works Cited list. Instead:
  • For block quotations and stanzas, highlight the entire passage to be indented and hit the “Increase Indent” arrow in your “Format” menu bar to move the entire text to the right.
  • For multiple lines of poetry appearing in your text, insert a slash surrounded by a space between each line.
  • In your Works Cited list, please create hanging indents, instead of using tabs or single spacing to create the indentations. In Microsoft Word, you create a hanging indent by highlighting your text, then clicking on “Format,” then “Paragraph,” then, under “Special,” choosing the “Hanging” option and clicking on “OK.”  
• Dashes are created by entering two hyphen characters between the two words you want to connect. Microsoft Word will turn the hyphens into an em dash.  There is no spacing between dash and text.
• Please use one space, not two, between the period at the end of one sentence and the capital letter at the start of the next sentence.
• Submissions should be made in a Word document, not in PDF format.

SOURCE CITATION: Leviathan follows MLA’s standard bibliographical format, with sources given in a Works Cited list and citations appearing parenthetically at appropriate points in the text. Please insert your Works Cited list after the text of your essay and before the endnotes. You may wish to consult the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (3rd ed.) for answers to specific questions about citing sources and preparing the Works Cited list. Here are some general guidelines:

Melville Texts: Leviathan uses Northwestern-Newberry editions for Melville quotation, with the exception of the Hayford-Sealts Billy Budd. The Longman Moby-Dick and Norton Moby-Dick are also acceptable options. Quotations from Melville’s poetry should be cited by page number or line number; Clarel should be cited by book, canto and line number (for example, 2.4.56-58 or, if the reference is unclear in a given sentence, Clarel 2.4.56-58).  

Parenthetical Citations: References in the text of your essay should clearly point to specific sources in the list of works cited. If you include an author’s name or the title of a book in a sentence, you need not repeat the name or title in the parenthetical page citation that follows, provided that the reference is clear. If you do not give the author’s name or book title in the text, you need to provide it in the parenthetical reference. If you list more than one work by the same author in your Works Cited, you need to indicate which text by this author you are referring to in your parenthetical reference. For ranges of pages follow these models: 34-39 (not 34-9), 104-8 (not 104-108), and 110-34 (not 110-134). Here are some examples of parenthetical citations:

Berthold has argued this point (178-85).

Or

This point has been argued (Berthold 178-85).

Or, if more than one work by Berthold is listed in the Works Cited,

Berthold has argued this point (American Risorgimento 178-85).

Parenthetical references that contain authors or short titles can be followed by subsequent references to page numbers only, unless citations to other texts intervene, in which case the author or short title should be repeated. Here is an example:

The Navy then lacked steam power, Melville explains, so the “innumerable sails and thousands of cannon, everything in short, [was] worked by muscle alone” (Billy Budd 59). Since this situation produced an insatiable demand for men, Billy is swept up by the force of an imperative that the nation itself must obey. Billy may have fast fists and an endearing spirituality, but any objection to being forced into military service “would be as idle as the protest of a goldfinch popped into a cage” (45).

Or, with an intervening parenthetical reference to another text,

The Navy then lacked steam power, Melville explains, so the “innumerable sails and thousands of cannon, everything in short, [was] worked by muscle alone” (Billy Budd 59). Since this situation produced an insatiable demand for men, Billy is swept up by the force of an imperative that the nation itself must obey. Historians have documented the history of naval impressment (see Wallace, Kelley, and Bryant). Billy may have fast fists and an endearing spirituality, but any objection to being forced into military service “would be as idle as the protest of a goldfinch popped into a cage” (Billy Budd 45).

Works Cited List: Below please find models for most citations.

Article:

Toner, Jennifer DiLalla. “The Accustomed Signs of the Family: Rereading  
         Genealogy in Melville’s Pierre.” American Literature 70 (1998): 237-63.

Book:

Dillingham, William B. Melville’s Later Novels. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986. 

Edition:

Bird, Robert Montgomery. Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself. Ed.  
      Christopher Looby. New York: NYRB Classics, 2008.

Chapter in Book:

Rampersad, Arnold. “Shadow and Veil: Melville and Modern Black  
      Consciousness.” In Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. Ed.  
      John Bryant and Robert Milder. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1997. 162-77.

WORKS BY MELVILLE:

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Ed. Harrison Hayford,  
      Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago:  
      Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1988.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Ed. John Bryant  
      and Haskell Springer. New York: Longman, 2006.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton  
      M. Sealts Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. 

Web Sources:  URLs are no longer required, unless readers would not be able to find the site without one. Give only author(s), title of site in italics, site publisher (if available), date of publication (if available), the designation “Web,” and access date.

Olsen-Smith, Steven. “Introduction.” Melville’s Marginalia Online. Boise  
      State U. 2006. Web. 6 May 2008.

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice page.

Peer Review Policy

Submissions to Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies should represent original work and should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Occasionally the journal publishes translations in English of work that has appeared in other languages or reprints work that has appeared before in foreign publications. Submissions are reviewed by the Editor and Associate Editor and, when appropriate, sent out for double-blind review. All submissions receive at least one substantive written assessment. Essays are evaluated for clarity of argument, persuasiveness of evidence, and contribution to scholarly debate. Reviewers make one of the following recommendations: accept, accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions, revise and resubmit, or decline for publication. Revised essays are assessed by the editors and also, when appropriate, by outside reviewers. Notes, poetry, and short fiction are also welcome, and the review process is similar. The time from submission to initial decision is typically 3-6 months.

Editor

Brian Yothers; brian.yothers@slu.edu

Associate Editor

Jennifer Greiman; greimaj@wfu.edu

Book Review Editor

Paul Hurh; jphurh@email.arizona.edu

Extracts Editor

Mary K. Bercaw Edwards; mary.bercaw_edwards@uconn.edu

Executive Secretary

Dawn Coleman; dcolema7@utk.edu

Advisory Board

John Bryant 
Dawn Coleman 
Christopher Freeburg 
H. Bruce Franklin 
David Greven 
Wyn Kelley 
Rodrigo Lazo 
Robert S. Levine 
Steven Olsen-Smith 
Samuel Otter

Editorial Board

Hester Blum 
Jonathan A. Cook 
Colin Dayan 
Michael Jonik 
Timothy Marr 
Cody Marrs 
Justine S. Murison 
John Samson 
Ralph Savarese 
Martha Nell Smith 
Jordan Alexander Stein 
Priscilla Wald 
Robert K. Wallace 
John Wenke 
Ivy Wilson

International Board

Massimo Bacigalupo 
Gordon Poole 
Athanasius Christodoulou 
Arimichi Makino 
Philippe Jaworski

Send books for review to:

Paul Hurh, Book Review Editor
Department of English
P.O. Box 210067 
Modern Languages 445
University of Arizona,
Tucson, Arizona 85721 
E-mail: jphurh@email.arizona.edu

Please send book review copies to the address above. Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Clarivate Analytics
  • Arts & Humanities Citation Index
  • Current Contents
  • Web of Science
• EBSCOhost
  • Current Abstracts, 4/1/2006-
  • Literary Reference Center, 4/1/2006-
  • Literary Reference Center Plus, 4/1/2006-
  • MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
  • Peace Research Abstracts, 1/1/1914-
  • Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, 3/1/2006-
  • TOC Premier (Table of Contents), 3/1/2006-
• Elsevier BV
  • Scopus, 2009-
• Gale
  • Book Review Index Plus
  • Gale Academic OneFile, 03/2002-10/2005
  • Gale Academic OneFile Select, 03/2002-10/2005
  • Gale General OneFile, 03/2002-10/2005
  • InfoTrac Custom, 3/2002-10/2005
  • MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• OCLC
  • ArticleFirst, vol.8, no.1, 2006-vol.13, no.3, 2011
  • Electronic Collections Online, vol.8, no.1, 2006-vol.13, no.3, 2011
• ProQuest
  • MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
  • Professional ProQuest Central, 03/01/2012-
  • ProQuest 5000, 03/01/2012-
  • ProQuest Central, 03/01/2012-
  • Research Library, 03/01/2012-

Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

0.3 (2024)
0.2 (Five-Year Impact Factor)
0.00006 (Eigenfactor™ Score)

Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor):
Note: While journals indexed in AHCI and ESCI are receiving a JIF for the first time in June 2023, they will not receive ranks, quartiles, or percentiles until the release of 2023 data in June 2024.
 

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Published Three times a year

Readers include: Those looking for scholarly articles, notes, reviews, and creative writing of a critical, theoretical, cultural, or historical nature on the impressive body of work of American novelist and poet Herman Melville

Print circulation: 348

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