Revista Letral

About Revista Letral

Revista Letral: Granada's Transatlantic Journal of Spanish-Language Literary Studies

Revista Letral is a peer-reviewed, open access academic journal of Latin American and Spanish literary studies, published by the University of Granada in Spain through its university press, the Editorial Universidad de Granada (EUG). Its electronic ISSN is 1989-3302. Founded in December 2008 as one of the principal products of the LETRAL research project (Proyecto I+D+i LETRAL — Líneas y Estudios Transatlánticos de Literatura), it appears twice a year, publishes in Spanish, and is organised around a deliberately transatlantic idea: that the literatures of Spain and Latin America should be studied in dialogue with each other rather than in separate national compartments.

That founding idea still structures the journal. Its sections — "Estudios transatlánticos" (Transatlantic Studies), "Miscelánea" (Miscellany), "Transversales" (Cross-cutting Studies), "Entrevistas" (Interviews) and "Reseñas" (Reviews) — mix comparative Spain–Latin America scholarship with open-topic literary research, interviews and book reviews. The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which records the University of Granada as publisher, no article processing charge, and a CC BY-NC licence, and the journal's own site lists indexing in Scopus, the Latindex Catalogue, MLA, REDALYC, DOAJ, ISOC, DICE, RESH and Ulrich's, together with the Spanish FECYT editorial quality seal and a MIAR ICDS score of 9.6 (2021).

Journal at a Glance

• Full title: Revista Letral
• Publisher: University of Granada (Editorial Universidad de Granada, EUG), Granada, Spain
• Electronic ISSN: 1989-3302
• Founded: December 2008, as an output of the Proyecto I+D+i LETRAL
• Frequency: Semiannual (two issues per year)
• Access: Open access, electronic
• Article charges: No article processing charge recorded in DOAJ
• Licence: CC BY-NC, per its DOAJ record
• Language: Spanish (with bilingual abstracts and keywords, per the journal)
• Sections: Estudios transatlánticos; Miscelánea; Transversales; Entrevistas; Reseñas
• Quality marks (per the journal): FECYT Editorial and Scientific Quality Seal; MIAR ICDS 9.6 (2021)
• Platform: University of Granada journals portal (revistaseug.ugr.es)

History: A Research Project That Became a Journal

Revista Letral was born in December 2008, in the journal's own words, as one of the main achievements of the Proyecto I+D+i LETRAL, a Spanish publicly funded research project devoted to transatlantic lines and studies in literature. Project-born journals often fold when the funding cycle ends; Letral instead consolidated itself as a standing scientific publication, kept its semiannual rhythm, and progressively accumulated the external validations — indexing, quality seals, an international editorial board — that mark a mature journal. Its editorial board, from the beginning, has been composed of recognised specialists in Latin American and Spanish literature at prestigious institutions internationally, and the journal highlights a strategic collaboration with Harvard University through Professor Doris Sommer as a marker of its transatlantic reach.

Ownership and governance are stated with unusual clarity on the journal's site — a direct consequence of Spanish university-press practice. Revista Letral is the property of the University of Granada, and its editing is the responsibility of the Editorial Universidad de Granada (EUG), the institution responsible for its management, production and dissemination; any change to its governance or co-publishing arrangements must be made within the EUG framework and under its supervision. SCImago's records name the publishing body more granularly as the Department of Spanish Literature of the University of Granada (Departamento de Literatura Española), which reflects the journal's academic home inside the university. For authors, this governance structure means the journal's continuity does not depend on a commercial publisher's portfolio decisions.

The journal's stated mission connects its history to its present aims: to foster the production, exchange and dissemination of knowledge in Spanish-language literary studies, with special attention to the transatlantic dialogue between Latin America and Spain; to consolidate itself as a reference forum integrating innovative and plural perspectives; to promote academic excellence, equity — including an explicit objective of favouring gender equity in article authorship — and international projection; and to guarantee open and free access to scientific knowledge. These are the journal's own published objectives, and they explain concrete features of the title, from its section structure to its open access model.

Scope: Spanish-Language Literature Across the Atlantic

Revista Letral is dedicated to the research, development and dissemination of Latin American and Spanish literary studies, with a preferentially transatlantic approach. It aims to offer a quality scientific space that promotes dialogue between the two literary traditions in the Spanish language, and it structures each issue to approach literature in Spanish, in its multiple manifestations, from diverse theoretical approaches and disciplines.

The section architecture is the best map of what the journal actually publishes. "Estudios transatlánticos" carries the journal's signature work: comparative and relational studies of Spanish and Latin American literature — shared movements, mutual readings, exile and migration writing, publishing circuits, and the traffic of forms across the ocean. "Miscelánea" opens the issue to literary research that does not need a transatlantic frame: single-author studies, genre and period work, and textual scholarship in either tradition. "Transversales" hosts cross-cutting, interdisciplinary contributions — literature in dialogue with other arts, media, and cultural studies approaches. "Entrevistas" publishes interviews, a genre with a long life in Hispanism, and "Reseñas" carries book reviews that keep the journal connected to the current output of the field's presses.

The journal's target readership, as it describes it, is the academic and scientific community interested in Latin American and Spanish literary studies from transatlantic, comparatist and interdisciplinary perspectives: researchers, university teachers, postgraduate students, literary critics and specialists in Hispanic literature, along with humanities and social-science professionals working in cultural studies, literary theory and publishing. It also explicitly welcomes readers outside the academy who want to deepen their knowledge of contemporary literary dynamics between Latin America and Spain, the emerging aesthetics of both, and the cultural circulation circuits that connect them.

Peer Review, Access, Licensing and Costs

Revista Letral is an academic journal whose editorial rigour, its site states, rests on peer evaluation (evaluación por pares), on bilingual publication of abstracts and keywords, and on a majority participation of collaborators and editors external to the publishing institution — three criteria that Spanish journal-quality frameworks, including the FECYT seal the journal holds, treat as core indicators. The journal does not, in the material retrieved for this profile, publish a named review model (single-blind or double-blind) in its main about text, so authors should confirm the current review arrangements in the journal's author guidelines on its portal rather than relying on third-party summaries, several of which describe the journal imprecisely.

For readers and authors the economics are simple. The journal is open access and electronic: every issue is freely readable on the University of Granada journals portal. Its DOAJ record — retrieved directly from the DOAJ search API for ISSN 1989-3302 for this profile — confirms no article processing charge and a CC BY-NC licence, so authors pay nothing to publish and readers may reuse content non-commercially with attribution. In a field where some literary-studies journals still sit behind subscription paywalls and others charge substantial open access fees, a no-fee, university-press, Scopus-tracked title is a materially attractive combination, and it is consistent with the journal's stated objective of guaranteeing free access to scientific knowledge.

Metrics and Indexing: Reading Three Different Numbers Carefully

The journal's own site lists its indexing as Scopus, the Latindex Catalogue, MLA, REDALYC, DOAJ, ISOC, DICE, RESH and Ulrich's, and states that it holds the FECYT Editorial and Scientific Quality Seal and a MIAR ICDS of 9.6 (2021). It describes its Scopus standing as Q1. That Q1 wording is the journal's own claim and should be read as such: SCImago quartiles vary by subject category and by year, and authors whose institutions reward a specific quartile in a specific category should verify the journal's current placement in the SCImago category that applies to them. The DOAJ listing itself is independently verifiable and is confirmed for this profile from the DOAJ API.

SCImago-derived figures, as republished by metric aggregators from Scopus data, give the journal an h-index of 7 and an SJR of 0.217 for 2024, easing to 0.145 in the 2025 figures — small absolute numbers that are normal for a semiannual, single-language literary journal, whose citation traffic is slower and smaller than in the sciences. The stored Journals World template h-index of 7 matches the SCImago-derived figure. Aggregators record the journal's Scopus coverage years as 2013 onward, which is worth understanding correctly: the journal itself was founded in 2008, so its first five years predate its Scopus coverage window; coverage start is a property of the database, not of the journal's existence.

OpenAlex, the open bibliographic index, resolves ISSN 1989-3302 to a single source record (S4306527659) named Revista Letral. On a direct fetch for this profile, OpenAlex counted 328 works and 221 citations with an h-index of 5, and flagged the journal as open access, with Spain as country. Its record also shows a first publication year of 1984, which conflicts with the journal's documented December 2008 founding and illustrates why OpenAlex metadata for humanities journals must be cross-checked: the count data are usable as an index-specific snapshot, but the founding-year field in that record is wrong against the journal's own documented history, and this profile follows the journal's own account. The difference between the SCImago h-index of 7 and the OpenAlex h-index of 5 is likewise a coverage difference between Scopus and OpenAlex, not an error in either.

Who Should Publish Here

Revista Letral is a strong choice for scholars of Spanish-language literature whose work is comparative or transatlantic in design — Spain–Latin America relations, shared literary fields, exile and diaspora writing, transatlantic publishing history — and for single-tradition literary studies that fit its Miscelánea and Transversales sections. Its combination of Scopus tracking, the FECYT quality seal, DOAJ listing and zero author charges makes it particularly valuable for early and mid-career Hispanists who need an indexed, quality-stamped publication without an APC budget. The journal's explicit commitment to gender equity in authorship and to international participation also suits collaborative and early-career work from outside Spain.

It is not the right venue for work outside Spanish-language literary and cultural studies, for scholarship that must publish in English to reach its audience (the journal publishes in Spanish), or for research whose evaluation context requires a high-impact-factor science-style venue. Authors should also plan around the semiannual rhythm: two issues a year means the interval between acceptance and appearance can be significant, and themed or section-specific submissions should be timed to the journal's calls as published on its portal.

How to Submit Well to This Journal

Work from the journal's portal on the University of Granada journals site (revistaseug.ugr.es), where the current author guidelines, section policies and submission system live, and treat any third-party description of the journal's requirements as provisional. Frame the paper for the section it targets: a submission to Estudios transatlánticos should make its relational, cross-Atlantic argument explicit in title and abstract, not merely juxtapose a Spanish and a Latin American case. Follow the journal's bilingual abstract practice — abstracts and keywords are published bilingually, so prepare both versions carefully rather than machine-translating at the end. Respect the journal's scholarly conventions for Hispanic literary studies: primary-text citation from identified editions, a bibliography in the journal's style, and engagement with the existing criticism in both Spanish and, where relevant, English-language Hispanism. Because external evaluators predominate in its review process, a manuscript should be written for a specialist reader who does not know the author's institution or prior work.

A Note on Names, Abbreviations and Citation

The title is simply Revista Letral — a name formed from its parent project, LETRAL (Líneas y Estudios Transatlánticos de Literatura). It is occasionally confused in aggregators with similarly named Brazilian and Portuguese titles such as Revista Letras; those are different journals with different ISSNs. The stable identifier for this journal is its electronic ISSN, 1989-3302, and citations should use the title as printed, Revista Letral, with year, issue and page or article numbering as given on the journal portal. Where a database offers both a departmental publisher name (Departamento de Literatura Española, Universidad de Granada) and the university press (Editorial Universidad de Granada), both refer to the same Granada title at different levels of the same institution.

The Transatlantic Idea in Practice

Transatlantic literary studies, the field the journal was built to serve, treats the Spanish-speaking Atlantic as a single, if unequal, literary space. Its characteristic questions are relational. How did Latin American modernismo reshape poetry in Spain even as Spanish critics claimed to be teaching the former colonies how to write? What happened to Spanish literary culture when the Civil War exiled a generation of writers, editors and publishers to Mexico, Argentina and Chile, and their presses re-founded Spanish publishing abroad? How do contemporary migrant writers in Madrid or Barcelona write back into both literary systems at once? A journal organised around such questions needs exactly the apparatus Letral has: a comparative flagship section, space for interviews in which writers and editors describe the circuits themselves, and reviews that track new books on both shores.

The journal's Granada base is part of this story. Granada is a historic centre of Hispanism with deep Latin American academic links, and a university-press journal edited there can draw reviewers and authors from both sides of the Atlantic without the mediation of a commercial publisher. For readers, the practical consequence is that a run of recent issues offers a compact, curated view of where Spanish-language literary scholarship is moving: which authors are being recovered, which theoretical frames — memory studies, ecocriticism, digital humanities, decolonial readings — are being tested against the Hispanic corpus, and how the balance between peninsular and Latin American topics shifts over time. Its Entrevistas and Reseñas sections, often skipped by research-only titles, make it useful as a field-monitoring tool as well as a research outlet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Revista Letral open access? Yes. It is an electronic, open access journal on the University of Granada portal, listed in DOAJ under a CC BY-NC licence.

Does it charge authors? No. DOAJ records no article processing charge for the journal.

When was it founded and by whom? In December 2008, as a principal output of the Proyecto I+D+i LETRAL. It is owned by the University of Granada and edited by the Editorial Universidad de Granada.

How often does it appear? Twice a year (semiannual), in electronic form.

What does it publish? Latin American and Spanish literary studies with a preferentially transatlantic focus, in the sections Estudios transatlánticos, Miscelánea, Transversales, Entrevistas and Reseñas.

Is it indexed? The journal lists Scopus, Latindex Catalogue, MLA, REDALYC, DOAJ, ISOC, DICE, RESH and Ulrich's; its DOAJ listing is verified in this profile, and it holds the FECYT quality seal with a MIAR ICDS of 9.6 (2021) per the journal.

Can I publish an interview or a book review? Yes. Interviews and reviews are standing sections of the journal (Entrevistas and Reseñas), alongside its research sections; prospective contributors should check the portal for the section policies and any length or format requirements that apply to these shorter genres.

Sources and Verification

This profile was compiled from the journal's official about and governance pages on the University of Granada journals portal (founding in December 2008 under the Proyecto I+D+i LETRAL, semiannual open access status, mission and objectives, section structure, indexing list, FECYT seal, MIAR ICDS 9.6 (2021), ownership by the University of Granada and editorship by the Editorial Universidad de Granada, Harvard collaboration through Doris Sommer); the DOAJ search API record for ISSN 1989-3302 (publisher Universidad de Granada, Spain, no APC, CC BY-NC licence, Spanish language); SCImago-derived figures republished by metric aggregators (publisher Departamento de Literatura Española de la Universidad de Granada, h-index 7, SJR 0.217 in 2024 and 0.145 in 2025, Scopus coverage from 2013); and a direct fetch of the OpenAlex source record S4306527659 (328 works, 221 citations, h-index 5, open access flag). Where sources conflict — notably OpenAlex's 1984 first-year field against the journal's documented 2008 founding — the conflict is flagged in the text and the journal's own account is followed.