Submission Guidelines for The Oxfordian (effective October 2015)
Article submissions to The Oxfordian will be reviewed by the editorial board, if they are sent to the editor Gary Goldstein via email with an editable attachment. An editable attachment is a computer file in Microsoft Word format (.DOC or .DOCX), Apple Pages format (.Pages), or in Rich Text Format (.RTF).
Submissions sent via paper postal mail will not be considered. Even if accompanied by return postage, paper manuscripts will not be read or returned. Portable Document Format files (.PDF) will not be considered either.
Please include your telephone number and postal mail address with your email submission.
Evaluation of manuscripts is through a double-blind review process. This means all articles are sent to the editorial board for review with the author’s name removed. The editorial board will not be notified who wrote any article during the review process. Additionally, the writer of a submission will not be informed which members of the editorial board have reviewed their work.
The Oxfordian seeks articles up to a maximum of 10,000 words. Unless what you have written is truly ground-breaking and especially compelling, we will not publish anything that exceeds this limit.
Submissions to My Oxfordian Bookshelf should be no more than 2,000 words. For this section of the journal we seek guest columnists to provide an appreciation or analysis of:
- a classic work of Oxfordian scholarship,
- an important work that challenges the Stratfordian authorship paradigm, or
- an underappreciated, or overlooked work on Elizabethan history.
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The Oxfordian is published once a year, in the Fall.
MLA format should be used in preparing articles for publication. Modernized spelling is preferred in most quotations from old sources. Proposals for articles are welcome as well as full articles in manuscript. Letters to the editor are encouraged.
The Oxfordian:
- encourages articles suitable for the general public interested in writing, literature, and theatre, presenting a similar level of reading difficulty and detail as would be found in general interest magazines such as Harper’s or The Atlantic.
- explores the discrepancies in the traditional theory of the Stratford man as author of the works of “William Shakespeare” and encourages continued research into the evidence supporting the theory that Oxford was the true author.
- looks beyond the Shakespeare canon to consider a wide variety of issues in the study of Elizabethan history, politics, literature, letters, publishing, religion, morals, science, sociology, and philosophy.
- looks within the Shakespeare canon, through focused literary analysis to deepen our understanding of the evidence for Oxford and the relationship between the works and the author.
- encourages debate and discussion of all issues in Oxfordian thought with the goal of drawing all who are interested in the authorship into contact with the SOF.
