Submissions

Manuscript Submissions
Legacy welcomes essays on texts and contexts of U.S. women writers from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. The journal seeks articles on individual authors’ works; genre studies; implications of race, ethnicity, class, and sexualities in women’s (con)texts; and historical and material culture issues pertinent to women’s lives and literary productions.

With all submissions (both essays and features), please include in the e-mail or cover letter a statement that the submission (a) has not been previously published in any form, including online (dissertations excepted); and (b) is not currently under consideration by any other journal or press (including as part of a book proposal).

Articles should be no fewer than 8,000 and no more than 10,000 words in length, including all notes and documentation. We can accept files in MS Word format, with a file extension of .docx or .doc, or in Rich Text format, with a file extension of .rtf. In preparing manuscripts, authors should follow the guidelines in the most recent edition of the MLA Handbook. For more information about these revisions, see the MLA Style Website.

Legacy‘s peer review process is double-anonymous, which means that the author’s and reviewer’s identities are concealed from one another. The author’s name should appear only on the title sheet, and references to the author’s previous work in the text or the notes should be in the third person. Any acknowledgment statements should be removed.

Permissions and copyright fees, if any, are the responsibility of the author and should be arranged for and paid as soon as possible after the article is formally accepted for publication.

Copyright policies
We cannot consider for publication any works that have been previously published. Publication, according to our definition of the term, includes print, electronic, and online formats. We can, however, consider work from dissertations available online through ProQuest, so long as authors have not signed their copyright away in the interim to another party or publisher.

Please include with your submission a cover letter indicating that the work has not been previously published in any form and is not under consideration elsewhere.

Manuscript submissions should be sent as e-mail attachments to:
Jennifer Putzi
Departments of English
College of William and Mary
legacyeditor@wm.edu

Inquiries regarding Book Reviews should be sent to:
Catherine Keyser
University of South Carolina
Department of English Language and Literature
Humanities Office Building
1620 College Street
Columbia, SC 29208
catkeyser@sc.edu

Guidelines for Submitting Materials to Legacy Feature Sections
We receive many queries from colleagues interested in submitting materials for various Legacy features. Below is a brief description of each feature’s purpose to guide the preparation of such submissions.

Authors wishing to submit a Profile or a feature for From the Archives, Legacy Reprints, or On Culture should first contact the features editor, Eric Gardner, with an e-mail query at gardner@svsu.edu. They should identify the kind of feature they propose to submit, briefly summarize its importance, and forecast the argument of the accompanying essay. The features editor will respond with a rejection or an invitation to submit. After submission these features are peer reviewed before receiving a final acceptance, recommendation for revisions, or rejection. Authors of features accepted for publication are responsible to obtain permissions to reprint materials from those who own copyright.

Legacy Profiles are self-contained essays whose purpose is to demonstrate the significance of a woman producer of cultural work. They focus, in the main, on their subjects’ biography and body of work. We have traditionally focused on women writers. Recognizing, however, that writing describes only a fraction of how cultural representations may be produced, we welcome Profiles about women whose work took other forms. Biographical and bibliographical information about the person being profiled should not be generally available in scholarly sources (such as biographies, scholarly articles, or specialized literary sources, e.g., Dictionary of Literary Biography.) Profiles should be, implicitly or explicitly, argumentative, not simply biographical. That is to say, they should demonstrate how an understanding of the work done by the person being written about might modify, expand, or make more complex our usual frames of understanding. Profiles are generally no longer than 5000 words, including sources and documentation. They include a short list of archival sources relevant to the subject. Profiles have traditionally included a short example of their subjects’ cultural production. In cases where this is available in print, it should be no longer than 1500 words.

Legacy Reprints differ from Profiles in that they reproduce in full a poem, story, or other text (usually no longer than 5000 words) that is not generally available in print sources and that is not under copyright. Reprints are introduced by a brief introduction (2500 words maximum) that focuses mainly on the importance of the text being reproduced. This introduction is not, therefore, biographical in nature.

From the Archives reproduces materials relevant to Legacy‘s mission that are available only in archival collections. These may be individual documents or collections of related texts (broadly construed). The reproduced materials are accompanied by an essay explaining the context for and importance of the material being reproduced. From the Archives features take various forms, depending on the material being discussed. They are generally longer than other features (7500-8000 total words, combining essay and archival texts). They may also be quite brief.

Essays in the On Culture section consider relationships between culture and our scholarship. Essays might examine how understanding specific cultural phenomena can enrich our approaches to various texts and writers from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. We welcome investigations of a wide range of topics from foodways to etiquette, fashion to fitness, labor to travel, and diverse other contexts. Alternately, essays might examine culture and scholarly practice in the field: what “recovery” might look like in a time of rampant book-banning, for example, or how the contemporary silencing of conversations about race and sexuality threaten the archive. The essays in this section should be brief (2500-3000 words, including documentation), provocative, and may be accompanied by illustrations or brief reprints, as appropriate.