BA History & English | Preliminary Examination - Course Handbook

These criteria will be used in marking portfolio essays in History and English Preliminary public examinations:

Portfolio essays will be submitted online. The body of your essays should be one and a half or double-spaced.

Short quotations of a sentence or less should not be set in a paragraph by themselves. Longer quotations should be set in a separate paragraph, indented and single-spaced. Don’t indent the first line of the first paragraph, or the first paragraph of a new section of the essays. Indent all subsequent paragraphs. Please remember to number the pages of your essays.

Copies of the texts or passages used must be included as an appendix to the portfolio, and the combined length of all texts you have chosen must not exceed 70 lines in total.

The word limits stated for portfolio essays include footnotes but exclude bibliographies and appendices , and the title of the essay/dissertation. Images, tables and figures are permitted where they may usefully illustrate the argument, and may be included without having to make a special request.

Further information will be available in the Prelims Examination Circular to Candidates, which is usually distributed in Hilary Term.

The English Faculty does not impose a mandatory referencing system, though your tutors may communicate their own preferences to you in the matter of style. It is compulsory, however, to present your work in a form that complies with academic standards of precision, clarity, and fullness of reference. Whatever system you employ, please remember these three essentials:

1. Consistency

Ensure that you are using the same style and format for your references throughout your work.

2. Clarity

Remember that references are included primarily as a guide for the reader. The more explicit you make your citations, the easier it is for anyone reading your work to find your sources.

3. Common sense

You will at some stage have to deal with a citation or a reference from a source which does not easily fit into a prescribed system. On these occasions, employing your own judgement will probably enable you to generate a reference in line with the others in your document.

An introduction to a common referencing system, MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association), is included below. This is intended for guidance only, and you are free to adopt other scholarly systems if you prefer. Paying close attention to the referencing systems used in the academic publications you read is another good way to familiarise yourself with habits of scholarly presentation.

A small sample bibliography of style handbooks is also given here, and you will find copies of these in the Bodleian and the EFL, as well as many other Oxford libraries. Style handbooks will go into much greater detail about formatting and writing habits than this Faculty handbook, which only covers methods of referencing.

*     Details given here are of first editions except where noted; many of these guides have since been republished in new incarnations and you may like to seek out the most recent edition.

Gibaldi, Joseph, MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1998)

Gibaldi, Joseph, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1984)

Price, Glanville and Brian Richardson, MHRA Style Guide: a Handbook for Authors, Editors and Writers of Theses (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2002)

*     This handbook is also available for free download from the MHRA website at http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/index.html.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edn (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Turabian, Kate L., A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, rev. by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory Colomb and Joseph M. Williams, 7th edn (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Below is a brief explanation of two MHRA approved referencing systems:

1. MHRA (general)
2. The author-date system

Both of the systems explained below have two points of reference. Firstly, each time you use a quotation, or any other information taken directly from your source, you must place a reference within the text (in parentheses) or in a footnote. Secondly, at the end of your work you will need to include a full bibliography detailing all sources. This is the case even for a system like the first which also provides full bibliographic detail within the text.

A guide to drawing up your bibliography is also provided below; see 2.3.4. Your bibliography will not count towards any word limits for assessed work, but references in the text and in footnotes will count, so you might like to consider a system (like the author-date system) which reduces the number of words contained in the reference.

The general MHRA system requires that the first reference to every book, article or other publication in your document should be given in full. Thereafter, references to the same publication may take an abbreviated, but easily identifiable, form (see 1.5, Abbreviated references).

Books

In general, a full reference to a book would appear in a footnote and be presented in the following order, with each piece of information separated from the next by a comma. (It may not be necessary to include all of this information for every book you refer to):

1. Author: in the form given on the title page, and with first name preceding surname. When referring to an edition of a primary work which contains the author’s name in the title, as with The Sermons of John Donne, it is not essential to repeat ‘John Donne’ before the title.
2. Title: in full and in italics. The initial letters of all principal words should be capitalised.
3. Editor / translator, etc.: in the form ‘ed. by’, ‘trans. by’, ‘rev. by’.
4. Series: if the book belongs in a series, give the series title and volume number.
5. Edition: if other than the first edition, specify ‘2nd edn’, ‘rev. edn’ etc.
6. Number of volumes: if the work is in several volumes, state this in the form ‘4 vols’.
7. Details of publication: these should be enclosed in round brackets, and take the form (Place of publication: Publisher, Date).
8. Volume number: in roman numerals. Where necessary, include the publication date of the volume in brackets after the volume number.
9. Page numbers: preceded by ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’, unless you have included a volume number.

Here are some examples of first references to books under the MHRA system:

Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. by Richard McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 221

Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society 1559-1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp.7-12

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. and with introduction, notes and commentary by Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 66

The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Barry Windeatt (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 41 – 50

Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 47 - 83

Chapters or articles in books

Information about a chapter or an article published in a book should be presented in the following order:

1. Author
2. Article title: in single quotation marks and not italicised.
3. ‘in’: preceded by a comma
4. Title, editor and publication details of the book as described above
5. First and last pages of article: preceded by ‘pp.’
6. Page number of reference: in parentheses and preceded by ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’

E.g.:

Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘“We are the makers of manners”: The Branagh Phenomenon’, in Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. by Richard Burt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 83 – 105 (p. 91)

Virginia Woolf, ‘A Letter to a Young Poet’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 1929 - 1932, ed. by Stuart N. Clarke (London: The Hogarth Press, 2009), pp. 306 – 323

Journal articles

A reference to a journal article should be composed as follows:

1. Author
2. Article title: in single quotation marks and not italicised
3. Journal title: in italics
4. Series number: in Arabic numerals, not Roman
5. Volume number: in Arabic numerals, not Roman
6. Year of publication: in parentheses
7. First and last pages of article: preceded by ‘pp.’
8. Page number of reference: in parentheses and preceded by ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’

E.g.:

Brean Hammond, ‘Joseph Addison’s Opera Rosamond: Britishness in the Early Eighteenth Century’, ELH 73.3 (Fall 2006), pp. 601 – 629 (p. 616)

Sylvia Federico, ‘Chaucer and the Matter of Spain’, The Chaucer Review 45.3 (2011), pp. 299 – 320 (pp. 301 – 307)

Online resources

An increasingly large amount of academic information can be found online. When choosing whether to use an online resource, you should use your judgement in determining the quality of the material. Who has created it, and why? Is it appropriate for academic citation?

When referencing an online source, you should keep as closely as possible to the guidelines given above for printed sources. Information should be supplied in the following order:

1. Author
2. Title
3. Title of complete work / resource: this might be the name of the website or an online database, or might be the bibliographic details for an online journal or text
4. Publication details: where known, supply the volume and date
5. Full web address, URL or DOI : in angle brackets < > . If you can find a stable URL or the DOI listed, this is better than the sometimes very lengthy web address you will have in your browser window. Avoid using TinyURL or similar for academic citation.
6. Date of consultation: in square brackets
7. Location of reference: for example, the paragraph number or page number where supplied. Include in parentheses.

E.g.:

Rosemary O’Day, ‘Family Galleries: Women and Art in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly 71.2 (June 2008), <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2008.71.2.323>, [accessed 14 March 2011] (p.332)

Hans J. Hillebrand, ‘Reformation’ in Encyclopedia of Religion, <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CCX3424502608&v=2.1&u=oxford&it=r&p= GVRL&sw=w>, [accessed 6 November 2010] (p. 7657)

Melvyn New, ‘Sterne, Lawrence (1713 – 1768)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26412>, [accessed 22 May 2011] (para. 12 – 16)

As more resources are accessed online, academic sites and databases regularly provide users with detailed bibliographic information about their content (often located at the very end of an article), which can be very useful when composing your footnotes.

Video Games

References to software should provide the author or designer (if identifiable), the title in italics, the date, and the platform, e.g.:

Emily Short, Galatea (2000), Z-machine.

Id Software, Doom (1993), MS-DOS and subsequently other platforms.

Neil McFarland and Ken Wong for Ustwo, Monument Valley (2014), iOS and Android.

Abbreviated references

After your initial, full reference, you can save space in the rest of your document by using abbreviated references to repeated sources. These abbreviated references can either be included as further footnotes, or can be placed in parentheses in the body of your document. In addition, it is permissible to include all abbreviated references to primary sources in parentheses and all abbreviated references to secondary sources as footnotes if you so choose.

Abbreviated references will normally consist of the author’s name followed by the page

reference (and the volume reference where necessary) as: (Strohm, 91).

Where more than one work by an author has been cited, you may also need to include a short version of the title, in addition to author, volume and page:

MHRA discourages the use of ‘op. cit.’, ‘loc. cit.’ and ‘ibid.’

If you are writing an essay which consistently refers to a set of primary texts by the same author – as in the case of your paper 7 extended essay and numerous tutorial essays – you may like to adopt a system of abbreviation. Following your first (full) citation of each text, you might say at the end of a footnote “All subsequent references are to this edition and

incorporated into the body of the essay”. Thereafter, you can place page numbers in parentheses within the text. If there is any ambiguity as to which primary text you are referring to, include a short title.

Alternatively, if you are consistently referring to a set of original primary sources such as manuscripts, or again, you are relying on a particular group of texts which you need to refer to repeatedly in your work, you may include a section in your bibliography that shows the abbreviations you will use for each source. For example, if you were writing an essay about Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and you were using the Michael Kiernan edition cited above as your primary text, you might enter it into your list of abbreviations as follows:

You would then label all references to the text with AL and the page number (again, you can do this in parentheses or in footnotes).

MHRA (author – date system)

This system can save you space when you are working to a word limit. Instead of including full references in the document, all source information is contained in a comprehensive bibliography at the end of your document. Such a bibliography would not be included in any word counts.

Your bibliography should be arranged in alphabetical order by author surname, and multiple works by one author should be arranged by date of publication. If two or more works by the same author share a publication date, you should distinguish between them by marking them e.g. ‘1995a’ and ‘1995b’. 

When you need to make a reference in your document, you should include it in the body of the text in parentheses. It should give the author’s surname, the date of publication and the page reference, in the following form: (Colclough, 2001: 105). If your text already mentions the author’s name, as in “Colclough suggests that...”, you may omit the name from the reference in parentheses.

OED Online (www.oed.com) is an online resource whose content changes every three months, when new and revised entries (along with other editorial and discursive material) are uploaded to the website. When you cite OED Online as your authority for a definition, or for any other information in an entry (etymology, pronunciation, range and date of illustrative quotations, etc), you need to specify two things:

1. The date at which you accessed the website - simply attach the words ‘accessed MONTH DAY YEAR’ as appropriate to whatever information you cite from the dictionary
2. The date at which the content you cite was published.

Currently, every entry on the website is displayed with an additional central bar, bearing either red or blue rubric, which specifies the first date and origin of the entry. Blue rubric indicates the entry has been revised since 2000 and is up-to-date. Red rubric warns you that the entry was first inserted in the dictionary many years ago and may not have been fully updated.

The noun relic, for example, is accompanied by blue rubric stating ‘This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, December 2009)’. So it is a reliable up-to-date entry, and when citing it you should specify the word itself, its grammatical form, the date at which the entry was updated, and your date of access, along with (if relevant) the sense number of the

definition you’re referring to:

e.g. relic, n., sense 3d: ‘An old, outmoded, or outdated person or thing; someone or something left over from an earlier era, or having the characteristics of a former time’, OED Online (revised entry Sept 2009, accessed MONTH DAY YEAR).

You may also find it relevant to quote or otherwise take note of the accompanying label, in this case ‘colloq. (humorous or derogatory)’. Note that there is no need to cite the URL.

By contrast, slang n³ is marked with red rubric stating ‘This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1911)’. This alerts you that the entry may be significantly out of date. The definition of sense 1 reads ‘The special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character; language of a low and vulgar type’. No dictionary of English published today would intentionally incorporate value judgements in its definitions, and this definition (and its vocabulary) is significantly out of line with current linguistic thinking about slang and its users. For an up-to-date definition of slang you need to use either a good quality recently published print dictionary or a reliable online equivalent (to find this via OED Online itself, see the link below the red rubric to Oxford Dictionaries Online (http://oxforddictionaries.com), which defines the word as follows: ‘a type of language consisting of words and phrases that are regarded as very informal, are more common in speech than writing, and are typically restricted to a particular context or group of people’.

When citing red rubric entries you should be sure to specify the date of first publication, e.g.

slang n³, sense 1a: ‘The special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character; language of a low and vulgar type’, OED Online (entry first published 1911, accessed MONTH DAY YEAR)

As before, there is no need to cite the URL.

Further information on citing the OED may be found on the English Faculty Canvas site.

Illustrations may be gathered in one place at the end of the work, or, if you prefer, incorporated with the text. The latter arrangement is more complex to achieve, and only recommended if you feel it will enhance your argument. Captions within the text, and ‘List of Illustrations’ at the end of the essay, should contain the same information but captions should minimally include the following:

• artist/architect/maker /manufacturer (e.g. Meissen)
• title of work/name of building/object description (e.g. teapot)
• date of production (date range or century acceptable)
• present location
• brief reference for the source of the illustration

The ‘List of Illustrations’ should include the following information, in the recommended order:

• artist/architect/maker
• title of work/name of building/object description
• size (metric)
• medium (e.g. engraving; ceramic; textile; mixed media)
• date of production
• present location
• brief reference for the source of the illustration (e.g., your own photograph, a museum photograph, copied from a book or the internet – if the last, give URL as you would for written work).

You should illustrate your paper or thesis carefully since good illustrations can be vital to supporting your arguments. Wherever possible, you should use good quality, high resolution illustrations of images, objects or buildings discussed at any length in the text. Illustrations can be in black and white; colour illustrations are only necessary if used to support a

specifically ‘colour-related’ point in your argument or discussion. Captions can simply be numbered sequentially as Fig. 1, Fig. 2, etc., since the reader will be able to refer to the ‘List of Illustrations’ for the full information. Make sure you refer to your illustrations at appropriate points in your text and argument, with the relevant figure number in brackets, thus: (Fig. 10).”

Captions and lists of illustrations do not count as part of the overall word limit; neither do illustrations themselves.

As with referencing, the format of your bibliography may vary according to the system you employ. Again, the most important thing is to maintain consistency in the way you present your sources in your bibliography.

If you have been using the MHRA referencing system outlined above, each item in your bibliography can be presented in much the same way as for the first full reference. The principal difference is that it is general practice to reverse the author’s surname and first name, as in the example below. When a work has more than one author or editor, you need only invert the first named author.

E.g.:

Berg, Christian, Frank Durieux, and Geert Lernout, eds., The Turn of the Century: Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Arts, (Antwerp: DeGruyter, 1995)

Caws, Mary Ann, ed., Mallarmé in Prose, trans. by Rosemary Lloyd and Mary Ann Caws, (New York: New Directions, 2001)

Page numbers are not required in a bibliography unless you are listing an article or chapter that appears within another publication.

Your bibliography should be ordered alphabetically and thereafter by date of publication. Do not include full stops after each item in the list.

It is common to divide your sources into primary and secondary works.