The Ted Hughes Society Journal

Submission Guidelines

The Ted Hughes Society Journal welcomes and encourages the submission of scholarly articles on the subject of Hughes's writings. Articles are peer reviewed by the members of the Editorial Board. In order to expediate the process of publication the Editor and Editorial Board requests the following stipulations:

  • All articles should be submitted electronically and attached to an email as a Microsoft Word document

  • Articles must be fully referenced and cited with a full and accurate footnotes. The responsiblity for supplying and accurately presenting such information is the author's alone

  • If an article is approved, it is the duty of the author to submit their work by the agreed deadline, which for the sake of equality, is final.

  • The Editor and the Editorial Board reserve the right to withdraw articles and their approaval for articles at any time and without prior notification. Their decision is final.

Your article should be submitted at the following address: journal@thetedhughessociety.org 

Valid Submissions  

  • Articles, reviews, relevant photography and artwork are desirable.
  • Original poems, prose fiction and plays should not be submitted.

 Length

  • Articles should have a maximum of 5000 - 7000 words.

Quotations

Quotations from Hughes's works must fall within the following 'fair dealing' guidelines:

  • The quotation of 10 lines, or multiple extracts up to 25 lines, dispersed throughout your work from an individual poem , providing that this does not constitute over 25 percent of the poem. Please note: an 'individual' poem does not include book-long poems. These are treated like a play (see below). A long poem with several parts is treated as if the part - i.e. 'XXXX' from Gaudete is an individual poem
  • Up to 250 words of prose, or multiple extracts up to 800 words, dispersed throughout your work.
  • Up to 18 lines of a play/book poem, or multiple extracts up to 70 lines, dispersed throughout your work
  • Please ensure that the quotation corresponds exactly with the original from which it is taken.
  • Short quotations (of less than forty words or two lines of verse) should be enclosed in single quotation marks in the main text.
  • Longer quotations should be set off from the text by means of increased space above and below the quotation, and indented.
  • Quotations occurring within short quotations should be shown by double quotation marks, and within longer quotations by single quotation marks.

 Punctuation and Spelling

  • Square brackets [ ] should be used to indicate editorial additions by the author to quoted text.
  • Parentheses ( ) are used for parenthetical statements and references within the main text.
  • To indicate the omission of part of a quotation, use three full stops separated from the surrounding text by square brackets, e.g. ‘Ted Hughes was [...] also an exceptional writer'.
  • Please leave only one character space between sentences.
  • Use British spelling (e.g. -ise for verb endings) as given in the OED, except in quotations where the original spelling should be retained.

 Abbreviations

  • Full points should be used in abbreviations. Note, however, that it is preferable in text to say:

‘for example' rather than ‘e.g.'

‘that is' instead of ‘i.e.'

‘and so on' instead of ‘etc.'

‘namely' instead of ‘viz.'

  • No full points should be used in upper-case abbreviations such as ‘US' or ‘UK' but please note that people's initials are spaced and followed by a full point:

A.A. Milne

Dates

Please use the following forms:

  • Monday, 9 November 1996 (that is, date as Arabic numeral, followed by month's full name, followed by full year in figures - not '96)
  • 1930s (not 1930's)
  • in the twentieth century (but twentieth-century literature)
  • 1899-1901, 1900-1, 1900-10, 1910-18, 1923-4, 1989-91

 Drama References

  • ‘Act III, scene ii, line 297' should be written as ‘III, ii, 297'.

 Ellipsis

  • Show ellipses by three evenly spaced dots on the same line, preceded by a character space and followed by a character space or by a closing quotation mark (or a closing parenthesis).
  • Avoid following ellipses with a full stop or a comma. See also Quotations.

 Hyphens, Em-rules (Dashes)

  • Please use en-rules throughout (-) except with standard word hyphenation, e.g. nineteenth-century literature, when a standard hyphen (-) should be used.
  • PLEASE DO NOT use longer dashes -- or ---
  • Unspaced en-rules are used between dates (14-17 July) and wherever the dash can be interpreted as ‘to'.
  • Spaced en-rules are used for parenthetical dashes (... asides in the text - authorial remarks and the like - are an example).

 References

  • Footnotes should be used and should follow the article and any appendices.
  • Note numbers (in Arabic numerals - 1, 2, 3,) should be placed at the end of a sentence or clause in the main text.
  • NB: WE DO NOT REQUIRE A BIBLIOGRAPHY.
  • In citing your sources, follow the MLA Style Guide. Italicise main titles, do not underline them. Give as much detail as possible - including any subtitle, the author's full name as given in the original, the series from which a book comes, volume number - ordering and formatting the information as in the MLA Style Guide and in examples in the below.

For later references:

  • The surname of the author and page reference are sufficient, except where there are two authors with the same surname or where more than one work by the same author has been cited. In such cases a shortened version of the title should be given.
  • Please avoid the terms 'ibid.', op. cit.' and 'loc. cit.'

Subsequent references to Hughes's letters and notebooks are made to an abbreviated form of the title and volume number:

  • Hughes, Letters, p. 245.

  • Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 30.

Wherever possible, details of the recipient of the letter/journal entry and the date of writing should be included in the essay text, but that if this is not possible, this information should also be included in the footnote: eg. Hughes ‘to Andrew Motion,' 19 November 1993.

 Images/diagrams

  • All image/diagram files should be sent separately and not embedded in the text. A note in the text should indicate where the image/diagram should be positioned.
  • In the first instance, only low-resolution files should be sent, so as not to overload the Editors' in-boxes.

Book Reviews

All the above formatting rules apply.