A Guide to MHRA Citation Style

Jeremy Davies
j.g.h.davies@leeds.ac.uk

This document is a guide to presenting footnotes and bibliographies in the format laid down
by the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA). It presents essentially the same
information as section 3.4.8 (pp. 47–50) of the Undergraduate Student Handbook, but in a
much more expansive, not to say prolix, way. Presenting your references or citations
correctly isn’t the most important of the things that your work in the School of English will
be judged on. But it is one of those things, and it’s far from negligible. An essay that uses
MHRA style correctly looks on first glance like well-prepared academic work, and that can’t
help but predispose your reader in your favour. An essay that doesn’t will inevitably lead
your reader to fear that he or she will encounter inaccuracy elsewhere in your essay as well.

The helpful thing is that whereas success in all other aspects of your essays requires you to
think freshly and inventively about a new topic every time, the basics of scholarly
presentation can just be learned. Once you’ve learned them, they’ll stand you in good stead
for every essay that you write. You don’t have to memorise them, because you can always
look them up again; at most, you just have to get used to knowing what you need to look up.
And they’re not intellectually taxing, though you do need to concentrate on some small
details and to spend a few minutes in every essay getting them right.

Over the years, academic writers have developed an elaborate and precise set of conventions
about how you should make reference to other people’s work in your own writing. By now,
there’s a degree of arbitrary etiquette involved: those conventions are things that you just
have to learn because that’s what the rules are. But citation style is not fundamentally about
catching people out or excluding them from the club. The opposite, in fact: it’s about
enabling communication. Engaging in discussion with other readers and critics is
fundamental to everything we do, and citation conventions are a way of allowing that
discussion to take place on paper as readily as possible. Conforming to the conventions
allows your readers to see what the sources are for what you’re saying, and allows you to
acknowledge what you’ve gained from other people’s writing, and to demonstrate that you’re
participating in a conversation rather than operating in a vacuum. All of the fussy rules that
follow are ultimately in the service of clarity and straightforwardness.

In the following pages I explain in detail how to produce the six most basic and common
types of citation, in the format developed by the MHRA (there are many other formats, but
MHRA style is the one used in all literature modules – though not language modules – in the
School of English at Leeds). There’s a great deal this section don’t cover: you’ll need to turn
to the MHRA guide itself1 if you want to know exactly how you ought to cite multi-volume
or multi-year works, facsimiles, anonymous texts, manuscripts, or any of a multitude of other
special cases. The large majority of texts you’ll cite, though, fall into one of these six
categories, and if you get them right, and take a common-sense approach to adapting the rules
described here when you need to deal with a more complicated case, you really won’t have
anything to worry about. As you’ll see, the MHRA rules aren’t completely rigid, and
sometimes have to be modified to deal with particular circumstances (see section 6 below);
the basic pattern, though, is standardised, which makes it fairly easy to learn.

There’s one important type of reference that the MHRA (obviously) doesn’t give guidance
on: how to cite from module coursebooks produced within the School of English itself.2 The
first section that follows describes a way that I’d recommend. I’ve chosen it because it keeps
things as simple as possible. Remember that the point of citations is just to explain to your
reader how to find for themselves exactly what you’re referring to, and the only likely readers
of your essays are other people within the School – for that reason, I don’t think anything
more complicated is needed. But I know that some tutors prefer you instead to cite
coursebooks using the method described in section 4 below.

1
MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses, 2nd edn (London: Modern
Humanities Research Association, 2008). Download it for free from <www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/
StyleGuide/download.shtml>.
2
This section isn’t directly relevant to students on courses like Prose: Reading and Interpretation that don’t
involve a coursebook containing primary texts. Those students will still need to read that section, though, if
they’re to make sense of the ones that follow.

2
 HOW TO CITE TEXTS ON FIRST APPEARANCE

I need to stress that these six sections only describe how to cite texts the first time you refer to
them in a footnote, and what to put in the bibliography. Citing texts on a second or
subsequent occasion is dealt with afterwards. Your first reference to a text in a coursebook, a
single-author book, an edited book, a chapter in a book, a journal article or a website, then,
should be done like this…

1. How to cite from coursebooks

a. In footnotes

Begin your footnote with the name of the author. Put their first name first, and then their
surname. Don’t swap them round: there’s no reason for doing that. Then a comma. Then the
name of the author’s work, which you should put either in italics or in quotation marks, never
both. Deciding which to use can be mildly complicated – very roughly, use italics except for
poems less than about five pages long. Then another comma (after the closing quotation
mark, if you’ve used one). Then ‘in’. Then the name of the module. Then, in parentheses (i.e.
‘round brackets,’ as opposed to square brackets), the calendar year (not the academic year) in
which the module was/is being taught. So by now you should have something like this:

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Bride of Lindorf, in Sensation Novels of the 1860s (2012)

Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘To Wordsworth’, in Literature of the Romantic Period (2012)

Next you need another comma. Then, if the text is only one page long, type ‘p’, a full stop,
and a space. If the text is more than one page long, type ‘pp’, a full stop, and a space. (In
other words, ‘pp’ is the plural of ‘p’.) Then give the first and last page numbers of the work
as a whole, separated by a hyphen.3 Then give the specific reference for the quotation itself,
in parentheses.4 How do to that depends on what you’re quoting.

If you’re quoting prose, give the page reference of the quotation. Use the same format as
before: either ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’, followed by a space, then the page number or numbers.

If you’re quoting poetry, don’t give the page number: type ‘l.’ or ‘ll.’ (that’s the letter l, not a
number 1), followed by the relevant line numbers.5 But if the poem is divided into sections,
and the line numbers start afresh in each one, you’ll need to indicate what section you’re
quoting from, too. Type the number of the section in lower-case roman numerals, highlight it,

3
Strictly speaking, an en-dash is correct. But a hyphen is absolutely fine.
4
Of course, you might just be identifying the text as a whole, not quoting from it. If so, skip the bit that follows.
5
An exception: if it’s a long poem and the coursebook doesn’t give you a running total of the line numbers,
you’ll need to just cite it by page number, in the same way as prose: you don’t have to try to count the lines
yourself.

3
and press CTRL+ALT+K to turn it into small capitals. Then a full stop and a space. Then
give the line numbers – you don’t need to do ‘ll.’ now.

If you’re quoting drama, that’s pretty much the same as dealing with a poem divided into
sections. Type the act number in lower-case roman numerals, highlight it, and press
CTRL+ALT+K to turn it into small caps. Then a full stop and space, the scene number in
arabic numerals, a full stop and space, and (if they’re given, e.g. for Shakespeare plays) the
line numbers.

Finally, whatever you’ve cited, the footnote ends with a full stop. Got all that? Here are
completed examples of those four main possibilities:

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Bride of Lindorf, in Sensation Novels of the 1860s
(2012), pp. 15–33 (p. 31).

Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘To Wordsworth’, in Literature of the Romantic Period (2012),
p. 153 (ll. 13–4).

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, in Literature of the Romantic Period (2012), pp.
55–73 (I. 288–96).

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in Scotland and the Renaissance (2012), pp. 103–48
(III. 3. 19).

b. In the bibliography

I think everyone just cuts-and-pastes their footnote references into their bibliography once
they’ve finished writing the essay, and that’s fine: it’s the easiest thing to do. But (even if
you’re in a hurry by that stage) you need to make some changes to the start and end of the
reference. Reverse the authors’ first names and surnames, put a comma between them, and
alphabetise your entries by surname. Delete the references to the specific pages you quoted
from: you’re listing the whole work in the bibliography. And don’t have a full stop at the end.
So the entries above should now look like this:

Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, The Bride of Lindorf, in Sensation Novels of the 1860s
(2012), pp. 15–33

Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, in Scotland and the Renaissance (2011), pp. 103–48

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘To Wordsworth’, in Literature of the Romantic Period (2012),
p. 153

4
 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, in Literature of the Romantic Period (2012), pp.
55–73

Done!

2. How to cite from single-author books

a. In footnotes

This is probably the simplest kind of reference of all. A lot of the rules for citing from
coursebooks also apply in this case. The main difference is that now you need to include
some information about who published the book.

Begin with the author’s name the right way round, then a comma, then the name of the book
(always in italics, in this case). If the book has a title and a sub-title, put a colon between
them – even though the title-page often won’t have any punctuation there (it’ll often
distinguish between title and sub-title by changing the font size instead). Then, in
parentheses, give the publication information. People often struggle with this.

First of all, don’t put a comma in between the book title and the opening parenthesis. People
do this a lot, which I don’t understand: when do you ever need a comma before a parenthesis?
Likewise, when you get to the colon one word later don’t leave a space before it, any more
than you would in ordinary writing.

Turn to the book’s copyright page: it’ll be very near the start, always on the left-hand (verso)
side. Pick out the details of the current publication, the details that describe when the edition
you’re holding in your hands was first published. You need three bits of information.

First, give the city where the publishers of the book have their main office. Don’t give the
country (‘U. S. A.’) or the county (‘Hampshire’), always the city. You’ll quickly get familiar
with the usual ones. Oxford University Press books (including World’s Classics) and
Cambridge University Press books are usually published in Oxford and Cambridge
respectively, though occasionally you’ll end up with an American edition of an OUP book,
published in New York. UK versions of Palgrave Macmillan books are published in
Basingstoke (which is in Hampshire, hence the mistake above) and Ashgate books until
recently in Aldershot and now in Farnham, but most other British books are published in
London, including modern Penguins (you’ll sometimes come across older Penguins from
Harmondsworth). American ones are more varied – you’ll see New York a lot, including for
Norton, but also Cambridge, MA for Harvard University Press books (try to include the MA
bit – short for Massachusetts – to distinguish from Cambridge, England), New Haven, CT for
Yale, Baltimore, MD for Johns Hopkins, and so on. Anyway. City name, followed by a
colon.

5
Then give the name of the publisher. The usual mistake here is to give too much information:
except for books published by university presses, one word is often enough. Thus, you should
say ‘Norton’, never ‘W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.’ It’s ‘Penguin’, not ‘Penguin Books
Ltd’. And so on – ‘Routledge’, ‘Continuum’, ‘Palgrave Macmillan’, ‘Virago’. They’re all
‘trade’ publishers; other books are published by ‘academic’ publishers – ‘Oxford University
Press’, ‘Duke University Press’, ‘University of California Press’, etc. Be sure to give the
details of the publisher, not the printer: ignore the bit saying ‘Printed in England by Clays
Ltd, St Ives plc’ or whatever. Follow that with a comma.

Finally, give the year. You want the year in which the present edition – the text in its current
format – was first published. That might not be the earliest or the most recent year on the
page. There might be a line saying something like ‘First published by Weidenfeld &
Nicholson in 1970. This revised edition published 1998; reprinted 2002, 2005, 2008, 2010’.
In that case, the year you need is 1998. The book published in 1970 would contain different
material, perhaps laid out on different pages, so a reader who looked up your quotation in the
relevant page of that book would probably find it wasn’t there. But the only thing that
happened in 2002 will have been that the publisher had another few thousand copies printed
off from the same template used in 1998, which you don’t care about. So 1998 is the year to
cite. Then close the parentheses.

After the publication details, give the page number or numbers of your quotation (if relevant).
Use basically the same format as in section 1a, except that there’s no need for parentheses
because you haven’t got page-extent numbers complicating things. The complete reference
should look like this:

J. A. Burrow, A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1965).

Mark S. Lussier, Romantic Dharma: The Emergence of Buddhism into Nineteenth-

Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. xix.

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the
Beauty and Terror of Science (London: HarperPress, 2008), pp. 133-34.

b. In the bibliography

Pretty straightforward, given what we’ve already learned:

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1991)

Prickett, Stephen, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony,

1700-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

6
3. How to cite from edited books

The books above are all relatively modern critical studies. You’ll also want to cite books
written by one person but subsequently edited by someone else – usually older, primary texts.
But there isn’t much to add, really.

You need the author’s name, a comma, the book title, and a comma. Then you need the
phrase ‘ed. by’ – don’t let your word-processing programme autocorrect that to ‘ed. By’ –
then the editor’s or editors’ names, then the publication details and page numbers as per 2a.
Similarly, if the book’s been translated you’ll need ‘trans. by’. Thus:

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. by Michael Mason (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 466.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Roger Woolhouse

(London: Penguin, 2004), II. 11. 2.6

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. by Christopher Betts (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 55–56.

What to do for the bibliography is obvious by now: reverse the first name and surname, and
delete any page references from the end.

4. How to cite from multi-author books

You’ll often quote from essays written by one person but published as part of a book written
by and edited by a bunch of different people. This needs a longer reference. It basically
involves putting together features of the first three types of reference – notice how many rules
about where commas go and so on are consistent across all these different types, so you only
need to learn them once.

Begin with the name of the author of the chapter from which you’re citing. Then a comma.
Then the name of the chapter, in quotation marks and not in italics. Then a comma, after the
closing quotation mark. Then the word ‘in’. Then the name of the book, in italics and not
quotation marks. Another comma. Then ‘ed. by’. Then the editors’ names (as always, the
right way round, not inverted). Then, in parentheses, the publication details. Then the page

6
Notice an exception to an earlier rule here. The book’s written in prose, but Locke himself divided it up into
lots of short sections, and I’ve cued my reference to one of those sections, using the same format as you would
for plays. I could have cited the page number (it’s p. 153), but because Locke’s Essay has been printed in many
different editions, and all of them include the same section divisions, it’s more helpful for a reader to know the
section number, so that she can find my quotation easily in any edition rather than just the Penguin one. As ever,
it’s essentially about communicating to your reader as clearly as possible how to find out the basis for what
you’re saying.

7
extent of the whole chapter, followed by the page references for your quotation if there is one,
like in 1a. Then a full stop.

Got it? It’s all built out of the same rules we’ve already seen. Altogether, it looks like this:

Judith Butler, ‘Moral Sadism and Doubting One’s Own Love: Kleinian Reflections on
Melancholia’, in Reading Melanie Klein, ed. by Lyndsey Stonebridge and John Phillips
(London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 179-89 (p. 185).

Shelley Rees, ‘The Brides’ Tragedy and the Myth of Cupid and Psyche’, in The
Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. by Ute Berns and
Michael Bradshaw (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 193-205.

Those are chapters within collections of essays. A poem in an anthology is the same. Notice
something else here: if you’re citing a book that says it’s a ‘second edition’, ‘fifth edition’, or
whatever, you need to indicate that in this way:

Paul Muldoon, ‘Why Brownlee Left’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. by
Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and John Stallworthy, 5th edn (New York: Norton,
2005), pp. 1979-80.

This is also the format that you use for essays taken from that invaluable tome, The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism. There’s one other novelty to introduce here. If a work is
edited, as the Norton Anthology is, by more than three people, you don’t list the names of all
the editors. Instead, give the first editor’s name, followed by ‘and others.’

In the bibliography rather than the footnotes, an entry for an Anthology of Theory text would
look like this:

Bhabha, Homi K., ‘The Commitment to Theory’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism, 2nd edn, ed. by Vincent B. Leitch and others (New York: Norton, 2010),
pp. 2353-72

That covers the process of citing single essays in edited collections. Sometimes, however,
you’ll want to cite the entire collection, rather than just one chapter of it. This is simpler, but
in the footnotes it involves doing something quite unusual:7 you start with the name of the
book, not of a person. Essentially, it looks exactly the same as the previous cases but with
everything up to and including the ‘in’ deleted. Thus:

Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats: Great Shakespeareans, Volume IV, ed. by Adrian Poole (London:
Continuum, 2010).

7
Not unique, though: the MHRA Guide includes other examples of cases where you start a reference with the
name of the book.

8
 Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency, and Performativity, ed. by
Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Keir Elam (Ashgate: Farnham, 2010).

But the bibliography is different: there you put the editors’ names first, so that you can order
the books alphabetically by the surname of the first editor in the usual way. Reverse the name
of the first editor, but not any subsequent ones: you only ever do the reversing-the-name thing
for the sake of alphabetical order. A single editor’s name is followed by ‘ed.’ and multiple
editors by ‘eds’ (with no full stop). So here there’s a bit more than usual to do to convert a
footnote into a bibliography entry. The two texts above should look like this in the
bibliography:

Crisafulli, Lilla Maria, and Keir Elam, eds, Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama:
History, Agency, and Performativity (Ashgate: Farnham, 2010)

Poole, Adrian, ed., Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats: Great Shakespeareans, Volume IV (London:
Continuum, 2010)

5. How to cite from journals

A lot of academic writing is published not in books but in journals. Essays published in
journals are articles, whereas the same essay published in a book would be a chapter.
Citations to articles are loosely parallel to those for chapters, but there are important
differences. In this case, the main mistake people make is to include too much stuff in the
reference. Here’s what you do:

Author’s name. Comma. Article title in quotation marks. Comma. Journal title in italics.
Comma. Volume number of the journal. Year of publication in parentheses. Comma. Page
extent not preceded by ‘pp.’. Then if relevant, parentheses, containing ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’ and the
page reference for the quotation. Full stop.

Let’s see that in practice:

Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN, 94 (1979), 919–30.

Simon Schaffer, ‘Self Evidence’, Critical Inquiry, 18 (1992), 327–62 (p. 350).

Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”’, New Literary History, 41

(2010), 471–90 (pp. 485–87).

Notice that there’s significantly less data here than for a book chapter. If you looked at the
first article, you’d see that MLN is published by John Hopkins University Press, and that this
article is from ‘Vol. 94, No. 5’, published in December 1979. If you looked at the second,

9
you’d see that it’s from the winter 1992 issue of Critical Inquiry, published by the University
of Chicago Press. You might easily assume you should include all of that information in your
citation. But you shouldn’t.

You don’t give place of publication or publisher details for journals, because journals are
great big enterprises that it’s easy for readers to find even without that information. As a
general rule, you also don’t give issue numbers. An ‘issue’ looks like a (usually slim) book,
and journals will typically publish about four issues a year, but all the issues published in a
given year will normally have their pages numbered continuously. That is, issue 1 might be
identified as ‘Spring’ and run from, say, page 1 to page 136, but then the pages in issue 2,
‘Summer’, will be numbered from 137 to 275, and issue 3, ‘Autumn’, from 276 to 405, etc.
All the continuously-numbered issues published in a single year will share the same volume
number (and the libraries that buy them will normally re-bind those issues into, literally, a
single volume). So you can see that just giving volume number and the page numbers alone
shows unambiguously where your article comes from: there’s only one page 919 in volume
94 of MLN. That’s why you don’t include issue numbers in your citation.8

There’s one more difference like that. Notice that unlike with book chapters you don’t put
‘pp.’ before indicating what the first and last pages of the journal article are. I don’t know
why that is, to be honest – you just don’t. But you do put ‘pp.’ in the next bit, when you show
which pages you’re quoting from.

A couple more examples – they’re just the same (and bibliography entries are done in the
normal, simple way):

Brandy Lain Schillace, ‘“Temporary Failure of Mind”: Déjà vu and Epilepsy in

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42 (2009), 273-87
(p. 285).

William A. Ulmer, ‘Christabel and the Origin of Evil’, Studies in Philology, 104
(2007), 376-407.

6. How to cite from websites

The most important thing to bear in mind about citing from websites is that this section
doesn’t necessarily apply to something just because you read it online. There are lots of
internet resources that give you online access to academic material. Usually, what they give
you is a PDF of an article, chapter or book, or a scanned image of the pages. That’s what
Literature Online, JSTOR, Project Muse, Cambridge Collections Online, Google Books and

8
Other, less formal periodicals do re-start their numbering with each issue. You might want to cite something
from, say, Radical Philosophy or Rolling Stone, or indeed a daily newspaper – with periodicals like that, you
need to explain more precisely which day’s or month’s issue you’re citing from.

10
so on all do. The rule is that if what you can see on the computer screen is the same thing
you’d see if you went to the library and took the book or journal off the shelf, you just cite
the book or journal directly. Because the person relying on your citation doesn’t care whether
you read it while you were sitting in your room or in the Brotherton. The only thing is to
make sure that what you’re citing really is the same as the physical copy.

This section, then, is about how to cite resources that are specifically internet-based. The
most prominent is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is now only updated online.9 The
next most prominent, I suppose, is Wikipedia. Some people don’t approve of any citations at
all to Wikipedia. I don’t (quite) agree. Never cite a Wikipedia entry as an authority on an
actual book or author you’re writing on: if you’re writing an essay about it, you really ought
to know a lot more than Wikipedia can tell you. But it can sometimes be a valuable source of
contextual information. Just keep your wits about you, only use entries that look solid and
reliable, and for anything crucial check elsewhere too. Never use rubbish like SparkNotes,
though.

The rules for citing internet resources have to be more flexible than the previous ones,
because the resources themselves vary so much. And in what follows, I’m deliberately
simplifying the rules that the MHRA Style Guide sets out a little bit, because I think that some
of what it recommends is redundant. In particular, I don’t think there’s any point in copying
out the whole ugly long URL for pages within major sites like the OED. Instead, the crucial
thing about online resources is to give the date when you accessed them. That way, readers
can use the archive functions to get back to the exact source you used, even if the main entry
has been changed in the mean time. So with all that said, here’s what you do.

Author (if applicable). Comma. Name of item/resource/entry/whatever, in italics or quotation

marks as appropriate. Comma. ‘in’ (usually). Site name in italics. Angle bracket. URL (or the
first part of it. Don’t let it autoformat as a hyperlink – press backspace). Close angle bracket.
Square bracket. ‘accessed 1 February 2012’ (or whenever). Close square bracket. Full stop.

So you’ll end up with something like this:

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, pl. 11, in The William Blake
Archive, ed. by Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi
<http://www.blakearchive.org> [accessed 6 November 2012].

Stephen Houlgate, ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

(Summer 2010 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
sum2010/entries/hegel-aesthetics/> [accessed 17 March 2012]

9
The OED has a neat feature: a ‘cite’ button on each page, showing you how to give a citation to the entry
you’re looking at. Unfortunately, it only does that for Chicago and MLA styles, which aren’t the same as the
MHRA style that you’ve just become an expert in.

11
 ‘Congress of Vienna’, in Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia < http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Congress_of_Vienna > [accessed 30 June 2012]

‘pedantic, n. and adj.’, in OED Online <http://www.oed.com> [accessed 4 September

2012].

‘nitpicking, n.’, in OED Online <http://www.oed.com> [accessed 5 September 2012].

FINALLY: HOW TO CITE TEXTS MORE THAN ONCE

You only go through all this malarkey the first time you cite a particular text. The second
time that you refer to that text, and all subsequent times, things are much briefer. As the
MHRA Style Guide puts it, ‘In all references to a book or article after the first, the shortest
intelligible form should be used.’ Don’t use ‘ibid.’, which can sometimes lead to confusion.
Instead, you have two options:

a) Short-form footnotes
This method is never wrong. To go back to 1a above: suppose The Bride of Lindorf is the
only text by anyone called Landon whom you cite in your essay, or that ‘To Wordsworth’ is
your only text by anyone called Shelley. We’ve seen what the first reference should look like;
from the second one onwards, they should look like this:

Landon, p. 27.
Shelley, l. 2.

Honestly: that’s all you should put. It’s an error to put anything more, as well as frittering
away your word count. Suppose, though, that you’re writing an essay that talks about both
The Bride of Lindorf and Brooks Landon’s book Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam
Man to the Stars. Or, which is a bit more plausible, suppose you’re writing about both ‘To
Wordsworth’ and another poem by Percy Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’. In that case,
second references to each of those texts would look like this:

Landon, Bride of Lindorf, p. 29.

Landon, Science Fiction, pp. 12-13.
Shelley, ‘To Wordsworth’, ll. 7-8.
Shelley, ‘West Wind’, l. 56.10

10
An alternative: if ‘there can be no doubt about which author is being referred to’, because of what you’ve said
in the main body of the text, you can even just give the short title of the work, and leave the author’s name out
of the footnote.

12
b) Parenthetical references
This method is a bit better, because a bit neater and more convenient, if you’re citing a
particular text a great many times. You can save yourself from having loads of footnotes all
referring to the same work (not that there’s anything especially wrong with that) by putting
page references in parentheses instead. In this case, you first have to add something to the
initial citation:

Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy, ed. by Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
p. 355. Further references are given after quotations in the text.

Then the second time you quote from Rob Roy, you just write something like this in the main
body of the essay:

Frank confesses freely that he ‘looked upon the Scottish people during [his] childhood,
as a race hostile by nature’ (95).

So doing that there’s no need for any additional footnotes at all – though notice that the first
time you quote from Rob Roy, you’ve still put the page reference in the footnote, not in a
parenthesis. Don’t overuse this method (don’t adopt it for more than one or possibly two texts
per essay, and not at all if you don’t have lots of quotations from a single text), but if you do
use it, make sure you use it consistently, rather than mixing footnotes and parentheses.

Though long enough already, this guide is just a first draft, and I’d like to make it as helpful
as possible. If there’s anything that I haven’t covered in here that you think it would be useful
for me to address, or anything that I have covered but that you think I could explain more
clearly, then please let me know.

JD, 6 November 2012 (minor updates 20/11/13)

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