MHRA Style Citation Demonstration
Click cover to enlarge | According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows: Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. by Jessica Goodman (Legenda, 2022), doi: 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'. Vatain-Corfdir, Julie Step 2. This is regular MHRA style, so the name's followed by a comma. Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, Step 3. Now we add the title, in single inverted commas. Any single quotation marks already in the title must be converted to doubles. Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’ Step 4. We have to say where this comes from, so: Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Step 5. Next we identify where the article is to be found, using italics, not quotation marks, for the volume title. Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage 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 '.' Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. by Jessica Goodman Step 7. 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. Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. by Jessica Goodman ( 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. Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. by Jessica Goodman (Legenda Step 9. Then the year of first publication, and we're done with the bracketed part. Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. by Jessica Goodman (Legenda, 2022) Step 10. This contribution has a DOI, so the Fourth Edition Guide (2024) requires us to quote it, like so. Vatain-Corfdir, Julie, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. by Jessica Goodman (Legenda, 2022), doi: 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 Julie Vatain-Corfdir, ‘“Much like at home”: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)’, in Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. by Jessica Goodman (Legenda, 2022), doi:, pp. 24-27. But in any subsequent notes, a heavily abbreviated form is used: 37 Compare Vatain-Corfdir, p. 17. |