MHRA Style Citation Demonstration

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

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy, Transcript, 12 (Legenda), pp. 131–38, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16kkxqd.11

This is in the author-date variant of MHRA style. MHRA's journals don't allow author-date citation, but some of its book series (notably Legenda) do: please talk to your editor before using this. (To see the demonstration for regular style instead, 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'.

Hartley, Julia Caterina

Step 2. In author-date style, we have a full stop, then the year, then another full stop. If there are multiple entries with the same author and year, letters would be used to distinguish them: e.g., Bloggs 1994a, Bloggs 1994b.

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019.

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

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’

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

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in

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

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina

Step 6. Now a full stop, the year of publication, and another a full stop:

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019.

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

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy

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.

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy, Transcript, 12

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.

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy, Transcript, 12 (

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.

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy, Transcript, 12 (Legenda

Step 11. Since we had the date of first publication up front, we don't need it here, so we're done with the bracketed part.

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy, Transcript, 12 (Legenda)

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'.

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy, Transcript, 12 (Legenda), pp. 131–38

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

Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. ‘Bibliography’, in Hartley, Julia Caterina. 2019. Reading Dante and Proust by Analogy, Transcript, 12 (Legenda), pp. 131–38, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16kkxqd.11

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

So how about citations in the main text, or in footnotes or endnotes?

The advantage of the author-date system is that these are very concise. In fact, you don't need a note at all. Suppose we quote from page 21:

The author reminds us of Shakespeare’s view: ‘Better a foolish wit than a witty fool’ (Hartley 2019: 21).

And notes are concise too. There's no difference in how to treat the first and subsequent notes.

34 Hartley 2019.

So is author-date easier than regular MHRA style? Not always. Firstly, it may not be allowed by your editor, so check before using. But secondly, it makes books easier to write, but only at the cost of making them harder to proof-read. If you discover at the last moment that Blenkinsop 1996 was actually published in 1995, that can mean hundreds of corrections to make, and it gets worse if an author has many publications in the same year, because Blenkinsop 1996e and Blenkinsop 1996d are easy to confuse.