Length:
5000-7000 words for articles (longer texts are also admitted but their publication will be subject to availability of space). 2500 words for book reviews. 1000 words for book notices.

Submission:
Manuscripts should be sent electronically  as an e-mail attachment (preferably Word for PC)  and must be accompanied by three clear double spaced printouts with wide margins.

Personal data:
The author must submit, on a separate sheet, the following information: the title of the manuscript, name, institutional affiliation, address, home and office telephone numbers and e-mail address. Personal information should be absent from the manuscript itself.

Abstract:
In articles, authors must include a 100-200 word summary written in English on the first page, below the title, indented and centred. A list of 5 key words in English should also be included. After this, please add the summary and key words in Spanish.

Language options:
Manuscripts may be submitted in English, Catalan or Spanish. If English is chosen, authors must consistently follow either British or American spelling.
 

Documentation

Quotations:
Use double quotation marks (a.k.a. inverted commas) for quotes of four lines or less and single quotation marks for quotes within quotes or for speech within a quotation. When a quotation is four lines or more, it must be indented as a separate paragraph without quotation marks. A quote within an indented quotation requires single quotation marks. Commas and periods must be placed after the quotation marks, but the symbols for interrogation or exclamation intrinsic to the quote’s meaning should be kept within the quotation marks. Omissions within quoted text are indicated by a space, three consecutive periods and another space. To indicate omissions at the end of a quotation, use four periods with no space between them and the end of the quotation, but with a space between them and the parenthetical reference. For example:

Both time and place deixis are greatly complicated by the interaction of deictic co-ordinates with the non-deictic conceptualization of time and space. To understand these aspects of deixis ... it is first necessary to have a good understanding of the semantic organization of space and time in general.... (Levinson 1983: 73)

As Rybczynski aptly points out, the modern subject began to obtain and identify itself with intimate, private domestic space only in the seventeenth century (1977: 44).

Can Madeira be included among Jane Eyre’s colonial backgrounds? Or does Azim’s treatment of Madeira as colonial stretch the meaning of the term beyond any usefulness to critical discussion? As the Portuguese critic Rui Homen writes:
From a strictly legalistic viewpoint as well, the privileges enjoyed by the British in Portuguese trade were duly validated by commercial treaties signed by the Portuguese authorities, and not by a simple de facto assumption of those possibilities by British individuals and companies. (1999: 117)

As Catherine Belsey claims, “Frye’s formalism is not entirely pure, however” (1980: 23).

Works cited:
A list of works cited must be provided at the end of articles. In accordance with the author-date reference system described above, the following format must be observed:
 

• author’s surname
• first name or initials
• year of publication (no parentheses)
• title of work
• place of publication followed by a colon and a space
• publisher

Examples:

Please note that surnames should not be written in block capitals in the works cited list. When an author has published more than one work in the same year, small letters (a, b, c) follow the date of publication. When the publication date of a first edition is given, it is placed in parentheses after the date of the edition used. In English titles, please capitalize all words except articles, prepositions, co-ordinating conjunctions, and the to in infinitives. Use colons rather than full stops between titles and subtitles, unless some other punctuation (such as a comma) is used on the title page of the source. Titles of books, films, plays, artworks, published dissertations, radio and television broadcasts, and web sites should be written in italics, as should the names of newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. Titles within such titles should be written in Roman type, e.g. Approaches to Teaching Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. Titles of articles in journals or anthologies, lectures, newspaper articles, songs and unpublished dissertations should be placed between double inverted commas. Titles within such titles should be italicized, e.g. “The Economics of Flight: Concern with Money in The Catcher in the Rye”.
 

Footnotes

Content:
Footnotes should be limited to authorial commentary that cannot be easily accommodated into the body of the text. They must not be used to make references that should appear in parenthetical documentation within the text.

Position:
Raised footnote numbers should be placed after the last word of the passage the author wishes to comment upon and after the punctuation marks, if that is the case (e.g. “...Johnson.¹”, not “...Johnson¹.”). The automatic footnote option in the author’s word processor must be used; please do not add footnotes or footnote numbers manually.
 

Format

Headings:
Headings indicating sections may be either centred or begun from the left margin, with no period at the end in either case. Headings that begin from the left margin should be numbered. Centred Roman numerals may be used instead of headings. All content-words should be capitalized. Headings require boldface. Subheadings should be in italics and additional divisions of a subheading should use Roman type.

Spelling:
Please note that if at all possible BELLS does not split and hyphenate words appearing at the end of a line. Please do not hyphenate such words in your typescript.

Cited forms:
Unfamiliar words or phrases from another language; an unusual technical term upon its first appearance; and letters, words, phrases, or sentences cited as examples within the text (not in an indented form) are to be printed in italics.

Emphasis:
If  necessary, italics may be used to highlight a word, phrase or sentence in the text. For other types of prominence, single quotation marks should be used (e.g. for scare quotes, i.e. when the author wishes to distance her/himself from the conventional meaning of a word or phrase).

Parentheses:
Use the following format for a parenthesis within a parenthesis: (which did not contravene the agreement (Vaughan 1994: 38)).

Full Stops:
Please leave a single space after full stops.

Dates:
Please write dates as follows: “20 July 1999”; “the 1950s”; “the seventeenth century” or “the 17th century”, not “the XVII century”.

Reviews and book notices:
Authors should follow the same guidelines as for the articles. Book notices should not include endnotes or parenthetical documentation.
 

Apostrophes:
The format of apostrophes depends on both the key you hit and the preferences selected on your word processor.
Characters appearing on three keys on the average European keyboard look apostrophe-like; these are the acute accent [´], the grave accent [`], and the apostrophe itself, which doubles as the single closing quotation mark [’]. The apostrophe appears, on Spanish keyboards, under the closing question mark [?], in the top row. Please do not use accents instead of apostrophes!

Apostrophes may take two different formats, ['] and [’]. BELLS uses the latter. To set you word processor’s preferences to this format, follow these steps:
 

• Microsoft Word: In the ‘Tools’ menu, select ‘Autocorrect’; click on ‘autoformat while you write’ and tick the appropriate box.

Dashes:
The format and spacing of dashes vary widely from language to language, from country to country, and from publication to publication. Some publications have taken to using single hyphens [-] in the place of dashes, perhaps because the former have a key assigned to them on computer keyboards. Other use the short en dash [–], which was once reserved for numerical ranges. BELLS uses em dashes [—]. As em dashes do not have a key, they must be inserted manually or via replacement codes. To insert manually, follow these steps:
 

• Microsoft Word: ALT+CONTROL+MINUS. Please note that this command only works with the numerical minus sign, and not with the hyphen key.

To insert via replacement codes, follow these steps:
 

• Microsoft Word: In the ‘Tools’ menu, select ‘Autocorrect’; tick the box for replacing text while you write; in the ‘replace’ box, write two contiguous hyphens [--]; in the ‘with’ box, insert an em dash [—] by following the steps outlined above; click on ‘add’.

Of course, should you choose to use replacement codes you will have to type two hyphens whenever you want a dash.

BELLS uses zero spacing with dashes, e.g.
 

Gorky attributed arcane, mostly baleful powers to what he saw; and the paranoid conviction of his writing—so like so much of the writing on the media today—convinced me that indeed the first experience of the cinema must be an event of stupendous cultural significance.

Please note that in English dashes no longer occur alongside commas or full stops, as they do in some European languages. In BELLS, dashes are not used alongside colons either.

Indentation:
BELLS uses a standard, single-tab indentation to begin paragraphs. Please insert these indentations manually; please do not set the preferences on your word processor to ‘automatic indentation after carriage returns’.

Quotation Marks/Inverted Commas:
BELLS uses double typographical quotation marks for short quotations and single quotation marks for scare quotes, i.e. to indicate that the writer wishes to distance her/himself from the conventional meaning of a word or phrase. Double quotation marks may take two different formats, [" "] and [“ ”]. BELLS uses the latter. You may set this preference on your word processor by following the guidelines in the above note on apostrophes.

Justification:
Please set your word processor for full or complete justification.

N.B. Authors who fail to comply with the above guidelines will have their paper returned for amendment.