MHRA Style Citation Demonstration
Click cover to enlarge | According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows: Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture, ed. by Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros (Cambridge: Legenda, 2003), pp. 16–34 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'. Jacobson, Stephen Step 2. This is regular MHRA style, so the name's followed by a comma. Jacobson, Stephen, Step 3. Now we add the title, in single inverted commas. Any single quotation marks already in the title must be converted to doubles. Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’ Step 4. We have to say where this comes from, so: Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Step 5. Next we identify where the article is to be found, using italics, not quotation marks, for the volume title. Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture Step 6. After the title come any editors or translators. It's 'ed. by', not 'ed by', because although 'ed.' abbreviates 'edited', we regard the 'd' as the second letter of 'edited', not the last: so the abbreviation doesn't contain the last letter, and thus must have a full stop '.' Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture, ed. by Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros Step 7. Since this is a book, not a journal issue, we have to identify its source, in round brackets. First, place of publication. This can be ambiguous. Legenda may be edited in Oxford, but the registered address of MHRA, which owns Legenda, is in Cambridge. Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture, ed. by Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros (Cambridge Step 8. 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. Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture, ed. by Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros (Cambridge: Legenda Step 9. Then the year of first publication, and we're done with the bracketed part. Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture, ed. by Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros (Cambridge: Legenda, 2003) Step 10. Now the pagination. This is a book, so 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'. Jacobson, Stephen, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture, ed. by Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros (Cambridge: Legenda, 2003), pp. 16–34 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:
Suppose we want to cite a passage on pages 24 to 27: 34 See Stephen Jacobson, ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Fontanellas: Narrative, Class and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture, ed. by Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros (Cambridge: Legenda, 2003), pp. 16–34, pp. 24-27. But in any subsequent notes, a heavily abbreviated form is used: 37 Compare Jacobson, p. 17. |