MHRA Style

The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) uses footnotes to direct the reader to the sources used in an essay or article.  This means that whenever you refer to another person's work, or you quote from a work, you insert a footnote number in your text.  Full bibliographic details of the source are then given in the footnote. Please note: the information below is taken from the third edition of the MHRA style guide. Links to an external site.

Always check with your department what their preferred style of referencing is.

How to use MHRA style: footnotes and in-text references

When you first provide a footnote for a text, give the details in full, including the page number. So, in the example below, footnote number '7' is the first time we have referenced this text. When we reference it again, it is reduced to a shortened form - just the author's name and the relevant page number.

7 Andrew Lycett, Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (London: Hutchinson, 2013), p. 94.

8 Baker and Clarke, I, 43.

9 Andrew Lycett, p. 109.

10 Nuel Pharr Davis, The Life of Wilkie Collins (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 46.


If you are using several texts from the same author, or if two authors have the same name, you should also provide the name of the text for clarity:

11 Lyn Pykett, Wilkie Collins, p. 5.


If you are referring to exactly the same text twice in succession (for example, twice in one paragraph, without another text in between) you can use 'Ibid', which essentially just means 'same as above'. Note that the 'i' for ibid should be capitalised.

12 Andrew Mangham, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Mangham, pp. 1-6 (pp. 3-4).

13 Ibid, p. 5.


If you refer to two or more texts in one sentence, you should put one footnote at the end of the sentence, and then provide both references separated by a semi-colon. So here, the sentence below uses two quotations, one from Allan and one from Pykett. Both authors are referenced under one footnote, with a semi-colon before Pykett's text. The order of texts in the footnote should obviously correspond with the order of the quotations used in the paragraph. 

Accordingly, sensation fiction was able to absorb and rework its readers’ immediate anxieties, uncertainties, interests and fascinations, becoming a ‘locus for the discussion of a range of extra-literary concerns’ and embodying and exploring ‘the hopes and fears of the Victorian middle classes’.34

 

34 Janice M. Allan, ‘The contemporary response to sensation fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Mangham, pp. 85-98 (p. 96); Lyn Pykett, The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’ (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1994), p. 10.

Note also that the footnote in the paragraph always comes after the punctuation mark (so here, a full stop). 

 

How to use MHRA style: presenting a bibliography

Your bibliography lists all of your sources in alphabetical order by the authors' last names. Your references are presented in almost the same way, with a few important differences:

  • The author's surname comes first (e.g. Pykett, Lyn).
  • You do not provide the specific page numbers that you have used, like you do if providing a footnote for a quotation. You are only giving the reference for the whole text. The exception to this is if you are referencing a chapter in an edited book or a journal article, where you provide the page range of the entire piece (e.g. pp. 291-305). 
  • You do not put a full stop at the end of the reference in a bibliography.

So the example below shows firstly a footnote for a reference, and then how this would look in the bibliography:

72 Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 36.

Mangham, A., Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

For specific examples of how to reference different types of texts, please either see guidance from your department, or use Chapter 11 of the MHRA Style Guide, following the guidelines in section 11.6 for your bibliography. 

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