Litera (Turkey)

About Litera (Turkey)

About Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies

Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies — in Turkish, Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi — is the official journal of Istanbul University's Faculty of Letters, Department of Western Languages and Literatures. It is an open-access, double-blind peer-reviewed, multilingual, scholarly and international journal, published online twice a year, in June and December, and it was founded in 1954. This JournalsWorld record, titled Litera (Turkey) to distinguish the Istanbul title from other journals of the same name, carries the print ISSN 1304-0057 and the online ISSN 2602-2117; both identifiers are confirmed by the OpenAlex source record for the journal, whose host organisation is Istanbul University.

Longevity is the first fact about Litera. A departmental journal that has survived from 1954 — through changes of title emphasis, language politics, university structures and publishing technology — into the platform era, where it now appears through Istanbul University Press and the Turkish national journal platform DergiPark, is a piece of scholarly infrastructure in its own right. Its purpose, in its own statement, is to publish theoretical and critical articles in literary and cultural studies and to provide an intellectual forum for exploring literature, art and culture, encouraging multidisciplinary approaches that focus on or include discussion of Western literatures and cultures. Its readers and authors are academics, researchers, graduate students and the professional and academic bodies around them, in Turkey and internationally.

History and Development

Litera was founded in 1954 as the publication of the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University — the department whose remit covers the Western literatures taught and researched in the Faculty of Letters. The Online Books Page archive record at the University of Pennsylvania, which tracks the serial independently, agrees on the essentials: Litera began in 1954, its numbering moved from issue numbering to volume numbering in the early 2000s, and publication was irregular in some earlier periods before settling into its present regular rhythm. A call-for-papers notice from 2010 fills in the middle of the story: after a long interval, Litera reappeared as a refereed journal in 2004 with its sixteenth issue, by then a biannual featuring academic articles in English and Turkish in literature, arts and culture.

The current chapter is digital and open. The journal is published online twice a year, in June and December, through Istanbul University Press, and its full presence — aims and scope, author information, archive and submission system — is carried on DergiPark, the Turkish academic journal platform. That platform move changed the journal's practical life: submission windows, editorial screening and peer review now run on a predictable published timetable (described below), the archive is openly readable, and the journal's multilingual character is formalised — it publishes articles in Turkish, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, the working languages of the department whose literatures it studies. What has not changed is the identity: a faculty journal, edited within a department of Western languages and literatures, publishing literary studies first and inviting linguistics, cultural studies and media studies in where they engage literary texts and traditions.

Publisher and Platform

The publisher of record is Istanbul University, through Istanbul University Press, for the Faculty of Letters and its Department of Western Languages and Literatures; the stored JournalsWorld record's country (Turkey) is correct, while its publisher field was garbled into a numeric code — one of the stored-field problems reported with this profile. OpenAlex independently names Istanbul University as the host organisation for the source carrying both of the journal's ISSNs, which corroborates the university as publisher. DergiPark hosts the journal's public pages and submission workflow under its journal code for Litera, and the university press site presents the same title, scope statement and open-access terms, so authors will encounter one journal through two doors: cite and read it through whichever platform they reach, but submit through the DergiPark workflow the journal directs authors to use.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Litera publishes disciplinary and interdisciplinary, theoretical and applied research articles focused on Western literatures — American, English, French, German, Italian, Modern Greek and Spanish literatures — and on linguistics, or examining literary texts in the framework of linguistics, cultural studies or media studies. Its aims and scope organise the coverage into three strands, and they repay close reading, because the journal enforces its scope at screening.

Literary studies is the core. The journal publishes original research on literatures in English, French, German, Italian, Modern Greek and Spanish, welcoming articles that critically engage with literary texts, demonstrate a strong analytical focus and use contemporary or emerging theoretical and methodological approaches. Descriptive, survey-based or purely explanatory studies that mainly summarise authors, periods, movements or frameworks without original critical intervention are not considered; preference goes to work that advances scholarly debate through close textual analysis and theoretically informed interpretation. Comparative studies across two or more Western literatures, and comparative studies between those literatures and Turkish literature, are expressly within scope — a door through which Turkish scholars can bring their own literature into the conversation without leaving the journal's remit.

Cultural and media studies are welcome where they engage directly with literary texts, traditions, authors, genres or movements in the named literary contexts: studies of literary adaptation, transmedial storytelling and the cultural and media representation of literary works are particularly encouraged, provided the engagement with literary texts and traditions, or with linguistic and semiotic approaches to culture and media, is clear and substantial. Linguistics and semiotics cover research on the English, French, German, Italian, Modern Greek and Spanish languages and comparative work involving European languages and Turkish, including theoretical and interdisciplinary work in areas the journal names such as ecolinguistics, ecosemiotics, media linguistics and semiotics, discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and digital linguistics, with methodologically rigorous analyses of literary, cultural and media texts encouraged.

The exclusions are as definite as the inclusions, and authors should honour them: the journal states that it does not accept submissions in translation studies, education sciences, or languages and literatures outside those specified; its scope page further excludes work mainly focused on foreign-language teaching, language pedagogy, curriculum development and educational practice, and translation and interpreting studies. It also lists article types it does not publish, including work derived from theses and dissertations, purely theoretical articles and literature reviews without the required critical engagement, work already published in full in conference proceedings, and manuscripts over its stated similarity threshold. In comparative cases at the edge of the fields, the editorial board reserves the judgement of whether a manuscript falls within scope and can be properly evaluated within the journal's peer-review framework.

• Literary studies: close, theoretically informed readings of texts in the Western literatures named above, including comparative work with Turkish literature.
• Cultural and media studies: adaptation, transmedial storytelling and media representation, anchored in literary texts and traditions.
• Linguistics and semiotics: theoretical, methodological and text-analytical work on the named languages, including discourse and digital approaches.
• Languages of publication: Turkish, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
• Out of scope: translation and interpreting studies, language teaching and pedagogy, education sciences, and literatures outside the named set.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

Litera is open to submissions twice a year, for a one-month window each time, beginning 1 May and 1 November, on the timetable stated on its DergiPark home page. After each deadline, manuscripts undergo a month-long initial screening by the editorial team; manuscripts outside the stated scope are returned to their authors, and peer review then starts for manuscripts judged suitable. Review is double-blind, as the journal states in both its university-press and platform descriptions. That published rhythm is genuinely useful to authors: it tells you when to have a manuscript ready, how long the first answer takes, and that scope fit is decided quickly and honestly before referees are troubled.

The journal's stated editorial policies add the usual scholarly guarantees in explicit form: subjects must accord with the aims and scope, priority goes to original research, and the excluded categories listed above are enforced. Its similarity rule — manuscripts with a similarity index above the threshold the journal states (10 per cent, on its scope page) are not accepted — is worth noting before submission, as is its rule against resubmitting previously rejected manuscripts in later cycles. An author who treats the scope page as a contract, and writes to it, will find the process predictable; an author who treats it as decoration will meet it at screening.

Metrics and Standing

The stored JournalsWorld record carried an h-index of 1 for this journal. OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint for the online ISSN 2602-2117 to source S4210227719 and fetched directly, gives a fuller picture: 273 works and 146 citations recorded for the source, a summary h-index of 5, an i10-index of 0, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.286. As elsewhere in this batch, both figures are reported with their sources and neither is blended into the other; OpenAlex's wider net across the journal's digital archive explains the difference in scale. The DOAJ position could not be verified for this profile — the DOAJ search API returned a server error during checking — so no listing is claimed or denied, notwithstanding the journal's verified open-access status on its own platforms, which is a separate matter from directory listing.

The standing that matters for Litera is disciplinary and national as much as bibliometric. It is one of the long-lived Turkish university journals in the humanities, the house journal of a major department of Western literatures, openly published by a national university press and carried on the national platform — the kind of venue through which a country's literary scholarship talks to itself and to the world. A citation aggregator's summary recorded a small Web of Science citation total for the title, reported here only to show that its citation life, while modest, is real and international; authors needing a formal indexing status for evaluation should confirm the title in the providers' own lists.

Indexing, Access and Fees

Access is open: the journal is an open-access journal on the statements of both Istanbul University Press and DergiPark, readable online without charge, with its archive carried on both platforms — the university press site and DergiPark between them hold the modern run, and archive records note DergiPark and official-site holdings reaching back through earlier volumes and issues. On fees the position is unusually clear, and it is one of the journal's attractions: Istanbul University Press states that there are no article processing charges or submission fees for submitted or accepted articles, with the journal's expenses borne by the university. Authors should still read the current wording on the journal's pages at submission time, but the verified position at research time was a complete absence of author charges.

How to Submit

Submission is a matter of timing, scope and craft, in that order. Timing: have the manuscript complete before a window opens — the windows run for one month from 1 May and 1 November — because a month is short for finishing a scholarly article and the screening clock starts at the deadline. Scope: test the manuscript against the three strands and the exclusion list on the journal's aims page; if the work is comparative at a field boundary, say so in a covering note and show how it can be evaluated within the journal's framework. Craft: the journal wants original critical intervention — close analysis, a theoretical or methodological position, an advance on a debate — and it says plainly that summary and survey work without that intervention is returned.

• Write in one of the journal's languages — Turkish, English, French, Italian, German or Spanish — and follow the author guidelines and style given on the journal's platform pages.
• Check originality and similarity before submitting: work derived from a thesis or dissertation, work published in full in proceedings, and manuscripts above the stated similarity threshold are not accepted.
• Do not submit work under consideration elsewhere, and do not resubmit a previously rejected manuscript in a later cycle; both are stated exclusions.
• Expect a month of editorial screening first; a scope return at that stage is a decision about fit, and the fastest route to a better outcome is a journal whose remit matches the piece.
• Use the DergiPark submission workflow the journal directs authors to, and keep the submission confirmation with your records for the double-blind review that follows.

Graduate students and early-career researchers — a named part of the journal's target readership — should note the thesis rule with care: the journal does not take articles derived from theses and dissertations, so the route in is a genuinely reworked, independently standing article, not a chapter with a new title. Written that way, a first Litera article is a realistic and worthwhile goal: the journal is international in intention, multilingual in practice, and free to publish in.

Who Should Read and Cite This Journal

Scholars of the Western literatures taught in Turkey will find their field's Turkish conversation here, in six languages. Comparatists will find the Western–Turkish comparative work the journal expressly invites, which appears in few other venues with this consistency. Linguists and semioticians working on the named European languages will find a humanities home that takes text analysis seriously. And readers interested in how a national university sustains literary scholarship across seventy years will find Litera itself an instructive case: founded in 1954, refereed in its modern form since 2004, and now open, platform-published and free to authors and readers alike.

Similar Journals

• Journal of Turkish Language and Literature (TUDED): Istanbul University's journal for Turkish language and literature, published by the same Faculty of Letters — the natural companion title, covering the Turkish side of the comparative work Litera invites.
• Comparative Literature: the long-established international journal of comparative literary study, a wider-world counterpart for Litera's comparative strand.
• The Modern Language Review: a major general journal for modern and medieval literatures and languages, overlapping Litera's European coverage.
• Turkish Studies: an international journal on Turkish society, culture and literature, neighbouring Litera where Western and Turkish literatures meet.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Litera's ISSNs?
The print ISSN is 1304-0057 and the online ISSN is 2602-2117. Both are carried on this JournalsWorld record and both are confirmed by the OpenAlex source record for the journal hosted by Istanbul University. Note that other journals also bear the name Litera in other countries; the ISSN pair, not the name alone, identifies the Istanbul journal.

Who publishes Litera?
Istanbul University, through Istanbul University Press, as the official publication of the Faculty of Letters' Department of Western Languages and Literatures. The journal's pages are also carried on DergiPark, the Turkish academic platform. The numeric code in the older stored record was a data error.

When was it founded, and how often does it appear?
It was founded in 1954. It now appears online twice a year, in June and December. Independent archive records confirm the 1954 start and note irregular publication in some earlier periods, with the refereed modern form dating from 2004.

Is it open access, and does it charge authors?
Yes to open access, and no to charges, on the journal's own verified statements: Istanbul University Press describes it as an open-access journal and states that there are no article processing charges or submission fees for submitted or accepted articles. Readers pay nothing either; the archive is openly readable on the university press site and DergiPark.

What does it publish, and in which languages?
Theoretical and applied research on Western literatures — American, English, French, German, Italian, Modern Greek and Spanish — together with linguistics, and cultural and media studies anchored in literary texts. Articles appear in Turkish, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Translation studies, language pedagogy and education sciences are expressly out of scope.

When and how can I submit?
Submission windows open twice a year, for one month from 1 May and from 1 November, through the journal's DergiPark workflow. Editorial screening takes about a month; in-scope manuscripts then enter double-blind peer review. Work derived from theses, work published in full in proceedings, and previously rejected manuscripts are not accepted.

What do its metrics show?
OpenAlex source S4210227719, resolved by ISSN and fetched directly, records 273 works, 146 citations and an h-index of 5 for the journal. The stored JournalsWorld record carried an h-index of 1. The figures come from different nets over a long, multilingual archive; quote either with its source named.

Conclusion

Litera is a survivor with a clear job: since 1954 it has given Istanbul University's Western-languages scholarship a refereed, multilingual home, and in its current form — open access, twice yearly, free to authors, screened and reviewed on a published timetable — it does that job in a thoroughly modern way. For scholars of Western literatures, comparative literature, linguistics and literary culture, especially those working between Turkish and European traditions, it deserves a place on the short list of journals to read first and to consider seriously for publication.