Early American Literature, published three times a year, is the journal of the Society of Early Americanists and of the MLA's Forum on Early American Literature. Its province is American literature through the early national period (about 1830). Founded in 1965, EAL invites work treating Native American traditional expressions, colonial Ibero-American literature from North America, colonial American Francophone writings, Dutch colonial, and German American colonial literature as well as writings in English from British America and the US.
Please click on the tab below to submit a manuscript to the journal. Note that you will need to create a Submittable account in order to submit an article to EAL.
For those interested in organizing a special issue for EAL, please read the Special Issue Guide before contacting the editors.
If you have questions about completing a submission for EAL, please contact EAL's editorial assistant at ealassistanteditor@gmail.com or contact Submittable's support team (support@submittable.com) for help with technical challenges.
EAL welcomes scholarship treating texts up to around 1830 that were composed in or treat the circumstances of life in North America.
All submissions must be in English, though they may treat works composed in Spanish, Dutch, German, French, Native American, or other languages.
Documentation should be in MLA format.
Please note: If you are submitting a revised essay that has already been reviewed by the editorial team, please do not create a new submission here. Instead, please send the revision as an email attachment to the existing email chain, or email the essay directly to us at ealassistanteditor@gmail.com.
Authors must secure permissions for illustrations and quotations drawn from proprietary sources such as unpublished manuscripts or Native American heritage expressions. There is no set limit on the number of illustrations that may accompany an article. If you wish to use images, these are the requirements from UNC Press:
"Please provide images that are at least 5” wide, with a minimum resolution of 300 pixels per inch (ppi). Tif/TIFF files are preferred, with jpg/JPEG acceptable if that is the only format available from an archive or library. Please secure written permissions and provide a copy of permissions."
Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words in length with notes and citations.
Submissions are typically evaluated by one or more outside readers, a member of the editorial board, and the Co-Editors and take approximately four months to process.
Preparing your Manuscript for Submission
To preserve our double anonymized peer review process, please follow these four steps when preparing your document:
1. Omit your name and institutional affiliation from your essay.
2. Revise self-citations, if included, to the third person in the essay body and endnotes.
3. Exclude your name from the "Save As" title of the document.
4. Remove any identifying information from the document properties:
- Open the document.
- On a Windows computer: Click File > Options (bottom left) > General > Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office. If your name and initials appear, please change your name to "Microsoft Office User" and your initials to "MOU." Then check the box "Always use these values regardless..." and click OK.
- On a Mac Computer: Click Microsoft Word (top left) > Preferences > Personal Settings > User Information. If your name and initials appear, please change your name to "Microsoft Office User" and your initials to "MOU." Then check the box "always use this name regardless...," and exit the screen.
- Resave the document.
Please direct any questions on submission guidelines to Assistant Editors Maggie Warren and Lauren Santoru at ealassistanteditor@gmail.com.