History and objectives of the review

History

Transalpina is a French peer-reviewed journal of Italian studies that considers the entire disciplinary field of Modern Foreign Languages (Language, Literature, History, Italian Studies). Published since 1996 by the Presses universitaires de Caen (PUC), the journal has been supported by the Italianist teams of the University of Caen; incorporated since 2008 into the Research Team on Literature, Imagination and Society (ERLIS).

Mariella Colin, Professor of Italian Language and Literature, has led the journal since its founding to 2020; in 2021, Viviana Agostini-Ouafi will succeed her; in 2017, Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro (Professor at the University of Paris 8) joined as co-director. This partnership has introduced a new dynamic into the journal, which is intended as an academic space, open to encounters and exchanges between Italy and France, and more broadly between Italy and Europe.

Objectives

The journal is bilingual (French and Italian). It is particularly interested in linguistic, literary and cultural exchanges between writers and intellectuals, focusing on the contemporary period (from the 19th to 21st centuries), with special attention paid to the Risorgimento. With more than twenty years of publishing experience, Transalpina has opened up new avenues in several areas. It successively explored the problems of literary translation, Italian literature in France and French literature in Italy, thematic literary analyses (the representation of family, death, or children’s literature) as well as the study of specific authors (Bontempelli, Carducci, De Amicis, or Pascoli). At the crossroads between history and culture, the relationship between writers and political power in the Renaissance, fascism and literary criticism, the heritage of the Risorgimento and its transmission, the networks between Italian and French intellectuals in the 19th century, or political film in contemporary cinema, the history, theories and practices of literary translation, the archives of translators and their communities of practice were approached with an innovative spirit.

This interdisciplinary strategy of openness and in-depth analysis constitutes the journal’s editorial line, which will be pursued by opening up new spaces for dialogue between linguists, literary experts and historians working on Italy, and on Italian as a foreign language, in France.

Editorial team and functioning of the journal

The editorial team

The journal is co-directed by the two directors, assisted by an editorial board made up of teachers from the University of Caen and the University of Paris 8, by a an international scientific committee and by an reading committee international as well.

The scientific committee ensures the recognition of the journal in the disciplines concerned (Italian Language and Linguistics, Literature, History, Civilisation and Culture) and endorses its editorial line.

The reading committee participates in the peer review of the articles according to the double-blind procedures: manuscripts (without the authors’s names) are sent to anonymous referees (belonging to the reading committee or external), selected for each issue of the journal depending on the skills required by the topic.

Editorial functioning

The journal is published annually. Each issue includes a thematic dossier, a Varia section and a bibliographical review section. The thematic dossier is chosen after consultation of the appropriate scientific committee and is the object of a specific call for contributions released on different platforms depending on the subject chosen – Calenda, SIES (Société des italianistes de l’Enseignement supérieur), SEFRI (Société d’études françaises sur le Risorgimento italien), Fabula, ADI (Associazione degli Italianisti). The journal does not publish conference or study days proceedings, but may decide to publish articles from communications which successfully passed the evaluation process.

Editorial operations are carried out according to a Code of Ethics, based on the model of the Committee on Publication Ethics (see the journal’s “Code of Ethics”).
Once the call for contributions closes, the editors-in-chiefs for the issue read the abstracts and CVs of the respondents, and give a favourable or unfavourable answer according to the relevance of the proposal.
The articles, whose length varies between 35,000 and 45,000 characters, must be accompanied by a short abstract in French, Italian and English, and must comply with the editorial standards and with the style sheet (a protocol for typesetting and typing in both languages, French and Italian), which are then communicated to the authors. The recommendations are those of the Presses universitaires de Caen (PUC), which can be consulted on the PUC website (https://www.puc-ed.fr/info/?fa=text41), under the heading “Informations aux auteurs”.

The editorial committee organises the peer review process and acts as an intermediary between the authors and the reviewers: its members read the articles in the first instance and decide on their distribution between the members of the reading committee and the external experts. The two appointed reviewers write an anonymous report according to a pre-established grid (double-blind proofreading), which they give to the editors-in-chiefs. The latter decide whether to publish it or not, possibly subject to requested corrections or completions.
A synthesis of the peer review is sent to the authors, who complete or correct their text if necessary before the final approval is given.
The authors of the articles that have been approved in their final version sign a copyright transfer agreement with the PUC.

Publication and distribution

The articles are published and distributed in paper version by the Presses universitaires de Caen (PUC) and in digital version on the OpenEdition Journals platform.
The full text of the articles is published online at https://journals.openedition.org/transalpina/ under Open Access.
In compliance with the provisions of the Law for a Digital Republic of 2016, the submission of the article by its author (in publisher PDF format) in the HAL open archive (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/) is authorised by the publisher as soon as it is published.
The author is not authorised to distribute the generated PDF onto any other type of open archive network that does not offer the same conditions as HAL (such as social or academic networks like Academia or ResearchGate, which do not offer file sustainability and which have a right on deposits). Only a hypertext link pointing to the PDF deposited in a permanent and institutional open archive is authorised.