Ramus

About Ramus

Ramus — Journal Profile

Ramus, in full Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature, was an Australian-born journal of innovative literary criticism devoted to ancient Greek and Roman literary texts, published by Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Core describes it as a journal of innovative literary criticism aimed at new analysis and interpretation of ancient Greek and Roman literary texts, intellectually pluralist in method, and primarily concerned with original and significant elucidation of ancient authors rather than with theory for its own sake. It carries print ISSN 0048-671X — the identifier stored on this JournalsWorld record — and online ISSN 2202-932X, the pair confirmed on the journal's own Cambridge Core page. The journal appeared twice a year for more than five decades, reached volume 52 in 2023, and then closed: Cambridge Core now marks the title as ceased, and the final issue, volume 52, issue 2, opens with a general editorial titled “The Last Ramus”. This profile therefore describes a completed journal — one whose back run remains a significant resource for classicists, and whose editorial model shaped theoretically engaged classical literary studies for two generations.

At a Glance

History — an Australian journal with a fifty-two-volume run

The first volume of Ramus appeared in 1972. Its opening editorial was written by A. J. Boyle and G. J. Fitzgerald, and the contents of that first volume already show the character the journal would keep: Charles Segal's long opening study of Theocritean criticism and the interpretation of the Fourth Idyll set close, theoretically alert reading of a canonical text at the centre of the enterprise, and later issues of the same early volumes carried work such as Peter Connor's “Soracte Encore” and A. J. Boyle's interpretive essay on Horace's amatory odes. OpenAlex, which indexes the journal's contents under the source record resolved from its print ISSN, records works from 1972 onwards, and its year-by-year counts run unbroken through the decades that followed.

The journal's Australian origin matters to its identity. Ramus was founded and edited from Australia at a time when classical literary criticism was dominated by British and North American venues, and it demonstrated that a journal edited from the southern hemisphere could set terms for the whole field. The editorial address pattern visible in its later stylesheet — manuscripts handled by editors at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Santa Barbara, with an associate editor, John Penwill, at La Trobe University in Australia — reflects how the journal's centre of gravity internationalised over its life while its Australian connection persisted. Publication by Cambridge University Press placed the journal inside one of the world's largest university-press journal programmes, with distribution, indexing and digital archiving to match, and the full back run is presented on Cambridge Core, where every volume from the first to the fifty-second can be browsed issue by issue.

The run ended deliberately rather than by drift. Volume 51 appeared in 2022 and volume 52 in 2023, and the second issue of volume 52 carried the editorial “The Last Ramus”, announcing the close. Its final issue was a themed gathering of studies around a single passage of Vitruvius' De architectura (3.1) and the figure of homo bene figuratus, with contributions on the Greek analogies behind Vitruvius' geometry of the body, on code-switching in the passage, and on its early modern and dystopian afterlives — a characteristic Ramus farewell, in which one ancient text is read from many methodological directions at once. Cambridge Core now lists the journal as ceased, and no volume 53 exists. For authors, the practical consequence is simple and is stated plainly in the submission section below: the journal no longer accepts new work, and its value today is as a fifty-two-volume archive.

Scope — criticism, not theory for its own sake

Cambridge's own statement of the journal's remit is unusually precise, and it is worth giving in substance. Ramus was, in the publisher's words, a journal of criticism, not of theory, primarily concerned with original and significant elucidation of ancient Greek and Roman authors. Within that frame it was intellectually pluralist, offering its pages to the full range of contemporary theoretical positions and methodologies — the publisher names Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism and social anthropology alongside narratology, deconstruction and reception studies. A journal review hosted by Princeton University, compiled from the journal's own guidance and a reading of its recent articles, makes the same point from the reader's side: it describes Ramus as the only leading classics journal that explicitly named and welcomed the use of theory in scholarship on classical texts, and notes that its articles were characterised as especially innovative in classics scholarship, whether for conducting theoretically informed work or for articulating new ways of imagining and theorising the discipline itself.

In practice, the theoretical approaches the journal published ranged across both long-established and newer territory. The Princeton review lists traditional and philological literary-critical approaches — genre theory, poetics, narratology and ekphrasis — together with interdisciplinary approaches including ecocriticism, postcolonialism, reception studies, feminism, and studies of gender and sexuality, as well as Marxism. OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's contents tells a consistent story in bibliometric language, grouping its output under classical antiquity studies, classical studies and philology, classical philosophy and thought, Renaissance literature and culture (the reception end of the journal's work), and theatre and performance studies. The centre of gravity throughout was the literary text: epic, lyric, drama, elegy, satire, the novel and the other prose forms of Greece and Rome, read closely and argued about seriously. Work whose main contribution was textual criticism, linguistic analysis, archaeology or ancient history without a literary-critical argument sat at the edge of the journal's remit, and prospective contributors were expected to understand that distinction.

A further defining habit was the themed issue. Across its run the journal repeatedly gathered issues — or substantial parts of issues — around a single author, text, passage or problem, so that several critics could work the same ground with different tools; the Vitruvius issue that closed the journal is a late example, and themed gatherings on Athens and on individual poets appear in its final volumes. This gave Ramus a second function beyond publishing articles one by one: it staged conversations, and a reader who takes up one of its themed issues gets a cross-section of the methods current at that moment, applied to shared evidence.

Editorial leadership and how the journal worked

The journal's Cambridge stylesheet from its final period names two editors to whom submissions were sent: Professor A. J. Boyle and Professor Helen Morales. Boyle's connection with the journal ran back to its first volume, which he co-edited and contributed to, making him one of the longest-serving editors of any classics journal of his era; Morales, a classicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, brought a profile in Greek literature, feminism and reception. The stylesheet directed authors to send submissions as an email attachment in Microsoft Word to one of the two editors, with the text carrying no indication of the author's identity — an anonymised-submission rule — and warned that no responsibility could be accepted for unsolicited material. For special issues, the Princeton review notes, a single-blind model applied, and detailed comments were normally sent only to authors whose submissions had been accepted or were thought suitable for revision and resubmission.

The house style was distinctive and demanding. The stylesheet asked for double-spaced text in Times 12 point, Greek passages in Unicode, a modified Harvard system of referencing — author's family name and date in the notes, with full details in a bibliography at the end — single quotation marks, and a first-line paragraph indent with no blank lines between paragraphs. The Princeton review, summarising the journal's practice, records articles per year in the range of seven to twelve, footnotes per article commonly in the range of eighty to one hundred, and article lengths rarely under 6,000 and rarely over 15,000 words. Those numbers describe a journal of long, densely argued essays: a Ramus article was expected to sustain an argument at length, with its evidence fully on display, rather than to report a note-sized finding.

Metrics, indexing and how to read them

Because Ramus has closed, its metrics describe a completed record, and different databases summarise that record differently — a point this profile states openly rather than smoothing over. The thin JournalsWorld listing that this profile replaces recorded an h-index of 15, drawn from the Scopus-based data behind that listing, and coverage described as 1993 and 2002–2023 in that source. OpenAlex, by contrast, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint at the time of checking (October 2026), records 714 works and 9,059 citations for source S4210222762, with a summary h-index of 48 and an i10-index of 231; OpenAlex's coverage begins in 1972, matching the journal's actual first volume. The gap between the two h-index figures is a database artefact — the services index different slices of the journal's run and count citations differently — and neither figure should be quoted without naming its source. What both agree on is the shape of the journal: a small-output, long-lived literary journal whose individual articles could accumulate substantial citation over decades.

On categorisation, secondary rankings placed the journal in the first quartile (Q1) for classics and for literature and literary theory in its final years — the standing this JournalsWorld record also carried — reflecting its reputation within a small field rather than a large citation economy. The journal is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals: a DOAJ search by its ISSN at checking time returned no listing, which is consistent with its subscription model. Its contents are discoverable through Cambridge Core itself, through the standard classics bibliographies and abstracting services that cover Cambridge journals, and through OpenAlex and Crossref metadata, where its articles carry Cambridge DOIs. Readers without a subscription should note that individual articles from the run are widely held in university libraries in the print volumes, and that authors' accepted manuscripts for many pieces also circulate in institutional repositories.

Access, fees and open access

Ramus was a subscription journal. Cambridge's instructions for authors mention Gold Open Access publication — with the note that, for articles published open access, all or part of the publication costs might be covered by agreements Cambridge University Press had made to support open access — which means some articles in the later run are freely readable on Cambridge Core, and the platform flags the journal as containing open access content. No article processing charge figure for the journal could be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, and because the journal has ceased publication the question is now historical in any case: there is no current fee schedule to quote, and any figure given without a source would be a guess. The honest summary is that access today is through institutional subscriptions, library holdings and the open access subset on Cambridge Core.

Submitting — the journal is closed

Prospective authors need the plain fact first: Ramus ceased publication with volume 52, issue 2 (2023), and it does not accept submissions. The submission details in the editorial section above are recorded because they document how the journal worked and because they remain a useful guide to the conventions of its articles for readers and citing authors — anonymised manuscripts, the modified Harvard referencing system, Unicode Greek, and long-form argument. Classicists whose work would have fitted Ramus — theoretically informed, text-centred criticism of Greek and Roman literature — should instead look to the living journals listed in the similar-journals section below, checking each one's current instructions on its publisher's site before preparing a manuscript, since word limits, review models and submission systems differ from title to title and change over time.

Who read Ramus, and what the archive is for now

The journal's readers were, and remain, classicists working on Greek and Roman literature, graduate students learning what theoretically engaged close reading looks like in practice, and scholars in neighbouring fields — comparative literature, reception studies, gender studies and ancient philosophy among them — who need the classical side of an argument. For a student meeting the journal for the first time, the most efficient route in is through its themed issues, where a single text or problem is treated from several directions in one place; for a researcher, the run functions as a fifty-year record of how classical literary criticism changed its mind, from the narratological and structuralist concerns of its early decades through the feminist, postcolonial and reception-oriented work of its later volumes. Citation of Ramus articles remains common in current classics publishing, and a closed journal with a complete, stable, publisher-hosted archive is in some ways easier to cite reliably than a living title whose platform may migrate.

Similar journals

Readers and authors looking for living venues in the same territory should consider: Classical Antiquity and Arethusa, both known for theoretically informed work on Greek and Roman literature; Helios and Illinois Classical Studies, which publish literary and cultural studies of antiquity; American Journal of Philology and Classical Philology, broader in scope but regular homes for literary argument; Phoenix and Classical World for North American classical scholarship; and, for the reception end of the field, the Classical Receptions Journal. Within JournalsWorld, profiles of neighbouring classics titles — including Medieval Sermon Studies for a later period's textual culture and the classical-studies journals in the directory's classics category — give further points of comparison. Each of these titles has its own ISSN record and publisher page, and their current status should be verified there.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Ramus? Print ISSN 0048-671X and online ISSN 2202-932X, as listed on Cambridge Core. The JournalsWorld record stores the print ISSN.

Who published Ramus? Cambridge University Press. The journal was founded in Australia in 1972 and was published on the Cambridge Core platform in its later decades.

Is Ramus still publishing? No. Cambridge Core marks it as ceased; its final issue is volume 52, issue 2 (2023), which opens with an editorial titled “The Last Ramus”.

What did Ramus publish? Long, theoretically informed literary-critical articles on ancient Greek and Roman texts — including themed issues on single authors, texts and problems — written as criticism rather than pure theory, in the publisher's own framing.

Who edited Ramus? The Cambridge stylesheet from its final period names A. J. Boyle and Helen Morales as the editors to whom submissions were sent; Boyle had been involved since the first volume in 1972.

What are the journal's metrics? They depend on the database: the listing behind the old JournalsWorld record gave an h-index of 15, while OpenAlex (source S4210222762, checked October 2026) records 714 works, 9,059 citations and a summary h-index of 48. Always name the source when quoting a figure.

Can I read Ramus articles free of charge? Some later articles are open access on Cambridge Core under the publisher's Gold Open Access route; the rest of the archive is available through subscribing libraries in digital and print form.

Can I submit an article to Ramus? No — the journal closed in 2023. The similar-journals section above lists living alternatives in the same field.

Sources and verification

This profile was researched in October 2026 from: the journal's page and instructions for authors on Cambridge Core (title, ISSN pair, scope statement, ceased-publication status, final volume and issue, open access note); the Cambridge Ramus stylesheet (editors, submission and style conventions); a journal review hosted by Princeton University drawing on the journal's guidance (article lengths, articles per year, theoretical range); the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 0048-671X (source S4210222762; works, citations, summary statistics, topics, first year of coverage); a DOAJ search by ISSN, which returned no listing; and the pre-existing JournalsWorld record for this post (stored ISSN, country and h-index figure), checked against those sources. Where sources disagreed — as the two h-index figures do — both are reported with their sources named.