Student Guide to Referencing
When presenting written work you must ensure that you have acknowledged your sources
fully and accurately.
This guide informs you how to:
•
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reference quotations using footnotes
present a bibliography
English Studies students are required to present quotations and references according to the
conventions given below; failure to present quotations and references correctly will
undermine the quality of your work and adversely affect your mark. Failure to reference
quotations fully and accurately may result in charges of plagiarism (please see section on
Plagiarism in your Programme Handbook).
You should use this guide in conjunction with the English Studies Section Guide to the
Presentation of Submitted Work.
For further guidance on referencing see Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of
Research Papers (New York: Modern Languages Association of America, 2003).
Quotations and footnotes
When quoting from a primary or a secondary source, you must reference your source by
providing the following details in a footnote:
•
•
•
•
the name of the author
the title of the work
full publication details (see examples below)
the number of the page from which you are quoting
Note: Microsoft Word will automatically insert and number footnotes: if using Microsoft Word
2007, click on ‘References’ on the ribbon and then the ‘Insert Footnote’ button.
1. Referencing a primary source (e.g. a novel, play or poem)
Novel
When quoting from a primary source, give full details of that source and the page from which
you are quoting in a footnote.
In his depiction of the magicians, Rushdie suggests that reality is not fixed
or stable : ‘The magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute;
they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the
service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was.’1
1
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1981) 399.
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Play
When discussing a play, give full reference details of the source from which you are quoting;
when quoting from that source, you must also identify the location of the quote by giving
details of the Act, Scene and Line. NB: you must reproduce the text as it is laid out in the
original.
Aristocratic values, which privilege birth and rank, are called into question by DeFlores
in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling:1
DeFlores: Look but into your conscience, read me there.
‘Tis a true book, you’ll find me there your equal.
Push, fly not to your birth, but settle you
In what the act has made you, y’are no more now;
You must forget your parentage to me.
Y’are the deed’s creature…
(The Changeling, III, iv, 132-137)
1
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, Renaissance Drama, ed.
Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
Poem
When discussing a poem, give full reference details of the source from which you are
quoting; when quoting from that source, you must identify the location of the quote by giving
the line number or numbers (where these are given in your source). NB: you must
reproduce the text as it is laid out in the original.
In his poem ‘The Idea of Ancestry’1 Etheridge Knight conveys the importance of a sense
of heritage:
Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown
hills and red gullies of the mississippi send out their electric
messages
(lines 22-24)
1
Etheridge Knight, “The Idea of Ancestry,” Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology
of the African American Literary Tradition, ed. Patricia Liggins Hill, (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1988).
2. Referencing a secondary source (i.e. a critical work)
When quoting from a secondary source, give full details of that source and the page from
which you are quoting in a footnote.
a. Referencing a source by a single author:
1
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002) 125.
b. Referencing a chapter in an edited collection:
1
Stephen Greenblatt, “Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play,” New Historicism and
Renaissance Drama, ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (Harlow: Longman, 1994) 63.
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c. Referencing an article in a journal:
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Jean-Marie Benoist, “The fictional subject,” Twentieth Century Studies 6:4 (1971) 88.
3. Referencing a source more than once
If you make more than one quotation from the same source, you may abbreviate the
reference given in your footnote.
The footnote reference for the first quotation would be presented in full:
1
Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000) 151.
Further quotations can then be presented in the following abbreviated form:
1
Allen 62.
4. Presenting quotations – additional guidance
a. Where a quotation of more than four lines is given indent the quotation from both right
and left margins. In such instances there is no need to enclose the quote in speech marks:
Bennett and Royle have drawn attention to the ways in which the Freudian concept of
the uncanny can be applied to the study of literature:
On the one hand, uncanniness could be defined as occurring when “real”,
everyday life suddenly takes on a disturbing “literary” or “fictional” quality.
On the other hand, literature itself could be defined as the discourse of the
uncanny: literature is the kind of writing which most persistently and most
provocatively engages with the uncanny aspects of experience, thought and
feeling … it makes the familiar strange, it challenges our beliefs and
assumptions about the world and about the nature of “reality”. 1
1
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995) 34.
b. Where a quotation is integrated into your sentence enclose direct quotations in
speech marks:
Freud drew attention to the ‘the uncanny effect’ of leaving ‘the reader in uncertainty.’ 1
1
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Penguin Freud Library 14: Art and Literature, ed. Albert
Dickson (London: Penguin, 1990) 347.
c. Where no direct quotation is given and you wish to either paraphrase a work or
acknowledge the influence of a secondary work without making a direct quotation, you might
do so in the following way:
Michel Foucault has drawn attention to the ways in which sexuality is constructed
through the discourses of Christianity, medical science, pedagogy and the law.1
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1
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1976).
Presenting references in a Bibliography
You must give a Bibliography at the end of your essay; the Bibliography lists all primary and
secondary sources referenced in the course of your essay. The Bibliography should also list
secondary sources which have influenced your argument but which have not been quoted
directly.
Your Bibliography should be divided into two lists: Primary Sources (listing the novels,
plays, poems, films etc you are analysing) and Secondary Sources (listing all critical
works). Entries must be listed alphabetically.
Please note the presentation of references in a Bibliography differs from the presentation of
references in a footnote:
•
the author’s surname must be given first and the details of the reference are
punctuated by full stops rather than commas
•
when referencing an article from a journal the full page range must be given
Note: You must acknowledge material taken from the internet. When referencing articles
and other material accessible online via the internet you must specify the pathway for
access. Sites may not be permanent and so the date the site was visited needs to be given.
Examples of Primary Sources
a. Novel:
Hornby, Nick. About a Boy. London: Penguin, 1998.
b. Film:
It’s a Wonderful Life. dir. Frank Capra, USA, 1946.
c. Television Drama:
Ally Mc Beal. USA, Fox, 1997-2002.
Examples of Secondary Sources
a. Secondary source by a single author:
Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London: Routledge, 2000.
b. Chapter in an edited collection:
Greenblatt, Stephen. ‘Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play.’ New Historicism and
Renaissance Drama. Ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton. Harlow: Longman, 1994.
c. Article in journal:
Rodas, Julia Miele. ‘Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles
Dickens and the Uses of Disability.’ Dickens Studies Annual 34 (2004) 51–97.
d. Website:
Landow, George. ‘The Dead Woman Talks Back: Christina Rossetti's Ironic Intonation of the Dead
Fair Maiden.’ The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/gpl1.html (24th June
2010).
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Sample Bibliography
Primary Sources
Waters, Sarah. Affinity. London: Virago, 1999.
Secondary Sources
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and
London: Routledge, 1999.
Fink, Janet and Katherine Holden. “Pictures from the Margins of Marriage: Representations
of Spinsters and Single Mothers in the mid-Victorian Novel, Inter-War Hollywood Melodrama
and the British Film of the 1950s and 1960s.” Gender & History 11:2 (1999) 233-255.
Geroux, Ellen. “Prisons in Aurora Leigh.” The Victorian Web.
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/61a16.html. (24th June 2010).
King, Jeanette. The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Kucich, John and Dianne F. Sadoff, eds. Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites
the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian
England. London: Virago, 1989.
Prins, Yopie. “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters.” Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Ed.
Richard Dellamora. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Vicinus, Martha. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women: 1850-1920.
London: Virago, 1985.
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