MHRA Style Citation Demonstration

According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows:

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures, 10 (Legenda, 2016), pp. 58–83, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16km1rt.7

This is how standard MHRA style would look. Some of its book series (notably Legenda) allow an alternative citation system called 'author-date', but please talk to your editor before using it. (To see the demonstration for author-date, follow this link.)

Let's take this bibliography entry one step at a time:

Step 1. We start with the name(s) of the author(s) of the article, inverting the first name into the form 'Forename, Surname'.

Bird, Stephanie

Step 2. This is regular MHRA style, so the name's followed by a comma.

Bird, Stephanie,

Step 3. Now we add the title, in single inverted commas. Any single quotation marks already in the title must be converted to doubles.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’

Step 4. We have to say where this comes from, so:

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in

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Step 5. Next, the author(s) of the book, which come before the title because this is a monograph.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie

Step 6. Now a comma, not a full stop:

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie,

Step 7. Here we have the book's title, in italics, not quotation marks.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning

Step 8. This book belongs to a series, so we'll name that. If the series is numbered, we give the number, too. No italics, no quotation marks in the series name.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures, 10

Step 9. Since this is a book, not a journal issue, we have to identify its source, in round brackets. Until 2024, MHRA style required a place of publication - for example, New York or Oxford. This is no longer given except in special circumstances.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures, 10 (

Step 10. Now a colon, a space, and the publisher's name. Here that's Legenda because this is the imprint name under which the book is published, even though Legenda is not strictly speaking a company. To decide these things, one must look at the exact wording of the preliminary pages. Our preference is for Legenda books to be cited as 'Legenda', and we word our preliminaries with that aim.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures, 10 (Legenda

Step 11. Then the year of first publication, and we're done with the bracketed part.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures, 10 (Legenda, 2016)

Step 12. Now the pagination. And we use 'p.' or 'pp.' as appropriate. Number ranges are elided in the last two digits: thus '2234-2265' should be '2234-65', and '102-109' should be '102-09'.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures, 10 (Legenda, 2016), pp. 58–83

Step 13. This contribution has a DOI, so the Fourth Edition Guide (2024) requires us to quote it, like so.

Bird, Stephanie, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Bird, Stephanie, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures, 10 (Legenda, 2016), pp. 58–83, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16km1rt.7

And that's the finished bibliography entry. Note that there's no final full stop.

So how about citations in footnotes or endnotes?

In standard MHRA style, the first time the work is cited in a note, it should be cited in full. This looks very like a Bibliography entry, but:

  • The author's name doesn't always come first: only for monographs. For collections and editions, the title comes first.
  • Even if the author's name does come first, it's back to being the right way round, so it's Forename Surname, not Surname, Forename;
  • Unlike Bibliography entries, notes are punctuated as sentences, and usually end in full stops.

Suppose we want to cite a passage on pages 24 to 27:

34 See Stephanie Bird, ‘Chapter 2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Ludicrous Melodrama and Comic Double Vision’, in Stephanie Bird, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, Germanic Literatures, 10 (Legenda, 2016), pp. 58–83, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16km1rt.7, pp. 24-27.

But in any subsequent notes, a heavily abbreviated form is used:

37 Compare Bird, p. 17.