Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature
Summer 2025 Issue Deadline: November 1, 2024
Winter 2025 Special Issue Deadline: February 1, 2025
Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, is one of the longest-running journal publications in the field of Victorian literature. It began in 1952 under the title The Victorian Newsletter, and its transformations over the last 70 years reflect the continued growth and reputation of the journal as a key professional publication that participates in the most recent and important conversations in the discipline of Victorian studies. Victorians is published in partnership with Ohio State University Press/Journals and is available both in hardcopy and online, hosted by Project Muse.
The journal now has a new submission portal, hosted by Scholastica, which you can find here: Victorians Submissions.
We also have a new email address to use for correspondence: victoriansjournal@baylor.edu.
Please see the following information about the Summer 2025 and Winter 2025 deadlines and CFPs:
Victorians Summer 2025 Issue:
Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature welcomes submissions of new work on all aspects of Victorian literature and culture. The journal especially welcomes work on gender and race, including a focus on non-white Victorian authors.
Deadline is on a rolling basis; must submit by November 1, 2024, to be considered.
Victorians Winter 2025 Special Issue: Race, Color, and the Victorians:
Guest Editor: Melisa Klimaszewski
This special issue aims to discuss understandings of race in the Victorian period in multiple genres: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, visual art, and drama. Racist ideologies often function in complicated, convoluted ways, and this issue is interested in highlighting the ideological mechanisms that underpinned messy thinking about race in the Victorian period. This issue will investigate perceptions of race in the nineteenth century not only by analyzing racialized or racist cultural productions but also by questioning the relationship between concepts of color and race. Essays might address questions such as:
- How did nineteenth-century discourses of race define blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture?
- How did marginalized voices converse with or disrupt dominant discourses of race?
- How was color itself defined subjectively or flexibly in the nineteenth century?
- How do discussions of skin and complexion relate to Victorian perceptions of color?
- How do fictional imaginings of color, race, and complexion complicate racial categories?
- How do Victorian imaginings of racial violence contribute to definitions of race?
- How did nineteenth-century visual art contribute to or destabilize definitions of race?
- How did color in visual art relate to or affect perceptions of race?
- How do narrative or generic forms (serialized fiction, periodicals, poetic forms, etc.) interact with perceptions and definitions of race?
- How do racialized discourses develop codependently with Victorian discourses of class, religion, and sexuality?
Deadline for submission is February 1, 2025. Accepted essays will receive immediate feedback with any revisions due in May for a December print date. Finished essays should be 7,000 - 10,000 words in length, inclusive of endnotes and bibliography. Please follow MLA (7th edition) formatting and documentation.
Authors may submit manuscript through our submissions portal: Victorians Submissions
Please direct any questions or expressions of interest to Melisa Klimaszewski at melisa.klimaszewski@drake.edu.
Thank you for considering publishing your work in this special issue!