SUBMISSIONS Article Format / Criteria for Evaluation / Submission Address / Book Review Format / Book Review Editors

The Editorial Board welcomes the submission of manuscripts written in English on any aspect of modern Chinese literature and culture, including film, television, performing and visual arts, architecture, popular culture, material and print culture. Authors should write in a style that is comprehensible to non-specialists in other fields and disciplines, but that is at the same time theoretically informed and original. Literary translations are published only if they are essential to an accompanying critical/analytical study. (MCLC publishes editor-reviewed translations, interviews, multimedia-intensive articles, and other miscellaneous essays on its sister website, MCLC Resource Center). Manuscripts should be double-spaced and submitted in duplicate to the address below. No electronic submissions. Length of submissions ranges from 30 to 60 pp.

MCLC adheres to MLA author/date in-text bibliographic style. This means all references appear between parentheses at the relevant point in the text, with author's last name (include an initial of the first name if there is more than one author in the bibliography with the same last name), date of publication (if an author has more than one entry with the same date, distinguish them by adding an italicized letter "a", then "b," and so on), a colon, followed by relevant page numbers (MCLC uses full page numbers, e.g., 132-145, not 132-45). For example, a reference to James Lull's book (listed below) might read (Lull 1991: 21). If the author's name is mentioned in the text, you may wish to place the reference immediately after the name, in which case you would simply put date and page number. These in-text references point the reader to the bibliography. Bibliographic format should be as follows (??? refer to Chinese characters):

Book:

• Lull, James. 1991. China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance. London: Routledge.

Edited Book

• Dutton, Michael, ed. 1998. Streetlife China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Article in Edited Book:

• Williams, Linda. 1992. "When the Woman Looks." In Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 561-577.

Article in Journal

• Zizek, Slavoj. 1991. "Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears." October 58, no. 1 (Fall): 45-68.

Chinese Article

• Wang Meng ???. 1992. "Zhongguo de xianfeng xiaoshuo yu xin xieshizhuyi" ??? (Chinese avant-garde fiction and new realism). Dangdai zuojia pinglun 54, no. 6: 4-5.

Chinese Book

• Wang, Dewei ???. 1993. Xiaoshuo Zhongguo: wanqing dao dangdai de Zhongwen xiaoshuo ??? (Fictionalizing China: Chinese fiction from the Late Qing to the contemporary). Taipei: Maitian.

Translation

• Mo Yan. 2004. Big Breasts and Wide Hips . Tr. Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing. [note : translator is indicated by "Tr," not "Trs." or "Trans."]

Please note that Chinese characters are used only for authors' or editors' names and titles of articles or books. Do not include characters for journal titles or publishing houses. Pinyin titles are not capitalized, except for the first letter of the first word and proper names. English translations of Chinese titles are also not capitalized, except for the first letter of the first word and proper names, when they are first given next to Pinyin titles. All subsequent uses of English titles in the body of the article should use capitals.

Footnotes should be used only to elaborate a point in the text or draw the reader's attention to certain sources, not for simple bibliographic reference. If you have a footnote at the same place as an in-text reference, you may place the reference at the very beginning of the footnote, followed by your elaboration.

Pinyin is the required romanization system, except for names that are commonly romanized otherwise (Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, Kowloon, etc.)

Disk copies of articles, preferably in Macintosh versions of Microsoft Word, must be sent upon acceptance of the article. Electronic versions are not needed when the article is submitted for consideration.

Glossary and use of Chinese characters . Key terms, important names, etc. should include original language (Chinese characters) placed in a separate glossary, not in the body of the essay. MCLC uses both complex characters (fanti zi) and simplified characters (jianti zi). In the glossary, terms are NOT italicized (even though they do appear as such in the body of the paper); book titles, journal titles, film titles, and drama titles are italicized; article titles, poem titles, and essay titles are put between quotations marks. Characters (e.g., author names and titles) included in the bibliography should not be included in the glossary. Ideally, bibliographies and glossaries with Chinese characters should be submitted using MacIntosh Chinese Language Kit with recent versions of MSWord, but PC Word 2000 is also acceptable. If you are using Mac, fanti characters should be in the Apple Li Gothic Medium font. For jianti , use the Hei font.

An abstract, to be published on-line, is required for all accepted submissions. The abstract should be a 2-3 paragraph description of the contents and argument of the essay.

Photographs, film and video stills, graphics, etc. should be submitted on CD-RW disks or Zip disks in tiff or eps format, with a resolution of no less than 300 dpi (preferably 600 dpi). Camera-ready copy is also acceptable (600 dpi laser print @ 131 lpi). Number your image files in the order in which they will appear in the essay. Be sure to include with your images, a Word document giving, in the same order, captions for each of the images. In the text of your essay, you must also include a "call-out" in parenthesis [e.g., (fig. 1)] for each of the images, indicating the placement of that image. Generally speaking, capturing images from videos results in an unacceptable poor quality. If at all possible, use film stills or capture images from DVD format.

Submitters from outside the US should remember to use American spellings and to place all commas and periods inside quotation marks (e.g., "'Diary of a Madman,' Lu Xun's famous story." NOT: "'Diary of a Madman', Lu Xun's famous story".)

Criteria for evaluation:

MCLC is a blind, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. All submissions are first reviewed internally by the editor. Submissions that pass the internal review are then sent to two external reviewers, who base their evaluations on the following criteria:

Originality. A submission should make some new and original contribution to the field(s). Originality ranges from presenting research on new material and increasing our knowledge of unknown aspects of modern Chinese culture, to treating known material in fresh and interesting ways, to offering new theoretical approaches or paradigms that have a more general import. Of course, to help us assess originality, authors should situate their contribution in the context of similar and related scholarship in the field.

Scholarship. The argument should be substantiated with relevant and sufficient evidence and examples. The scholarship should be sound and the theoretical apparatus or methodology applied sensibly and fruitfully.

Argument and style. The essay should be argued logically, coherently, and with clarity. Language should be clear, precise, and correct. An essay accepted for publication should not require a large amount of editorial work. MCLC encourages its authors to write in a fashion that is accessible to those outside a narrow sinological and/or literary studies readership. At the same time, we seek scholarship that is informed by issues raised in current theoretical discussions.

Submissions of Articles to Modern Chinese Literature and Culture should be sent to the following address:

Kirk A. Denton
Editor, MCLC
Hagerty Hall 398
The Ohio State University
1775 College Rd.
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1340

Inquiries should be addressed to Kirk A. Denton

Book Review Format:

As of fall 2003, MCLC stopped publishing book reviews in print format. All reviews are published online at the MCLC Resource Center.

Reviewers should adhere to the MCLC style for articles outlined above. Chinese characters are permitted in the body of the review. They should be placed at the relevant spot in the text proper, not in a glossary, as is the style for MCLC articles. Footnotes are also acceptable, though not necessarily encouraged.

Book reviews will appear simultaneously in two formats: published on the MCLC Resource Center and on the MCLC LIST, an email discussion list affiliated with the journal. Book reviews are housed in the "Book Review" section of the MCLC Resource Center, which one can link to from the resource center homepage or the MCLC journal homepage. Links to book reviews will be added to entries for those books in the MCLC Resource Center bibliographies. Book review authors should, if possible, scan the book's cover and include the image with the book review.

Book Review Editors: :

Responsible for Scholarly Works in Chinese Film and Media Studies:

Yomi Braester
Comparative Literature, Box 35433
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-4338

Responsible for Scholarly Studies of Modern Chinese Literature:

Michel Hockx
East Asia, SOAS
Thornhaugh St. Russell Sq.
London, UK WC1H 0XG

Responsible for Translations of Modern Chinese Literature:

Andrew F. Jones
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Durant 104
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2230