Guidelines for Authors

Because Storyworlds is designed to be of interest to readers in many fields, essays should be as accessibly written as possible—even as contributors are encouraged to engage in the best practices of narrative research in their areas of specialization, and to present cutting- edge scholarship on a given aspect of stories or storytelling. To this end, all technical terms should be carefully defined, and discipline- specific assumptions, concepts, and methods should be thoroughly explained.

Pertinent questions include (but are not limited to) the following: How do modes of storytelling—narrative ways of worldmaking—differ from other representational practices that involve the construction or reconstruction of worlds, in a broad sense? Put differently, when it comes to world- creation, what distinguishes narrative representations from other contexts in which people design and manipulate symbol systems for the purpose of structuring, comprehending, and communicating aspects of experience? What constraints and affordances do particular storytelling media bring to the process of building narrative worlds? What tools are needed to characterize, in all its richness and complexity, the experience of inhabiting a narrative world in a given medium or across different media? The purpose of Storyworlds is to provide a forum for sustained scholarly inquiry into these and related issues, whose investigation will require collaborative, interdisciplinary work by researchers from across the arts and sciences.

Submissions must be original work. Manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length, including notes and bibliography. The journal uses a house style based on the most recent edition of the MLA Style Manual, with dates always mentioned in the parenthetical citation (unless they are noted in the text itself). In the Works Cited section dates should be listed at the beginning of each citation, as in an author-date system.