Citing this Site: MLA Style citation of pages from The Literary Gothic
If your teacher has assigned a research paper, you'll of course need to cite your research. In the case of web pages, MLA style (which is the most commonly used style for literary research and writing) first requires you to determine what sort of site you're accessing; the information needed on your Works Cited page will vary depending on whether the site you're quoting from or referring to is a personal, professional, or scholarly project site; databases have their own particular requirement. I'm not sure that the various categories supplied by the MLA cover all the e-possibilities, but there it is.
This guide doesn't cover all those categories; for more information, go to the MLA's online guide to citing web resources. Since The Literary Gothic is a personal site, sort of (more on this below), this guide covers only that format.
Note: when you cite online resources, you need to know the web address (the "URL" or "URI") of the page you're quoting from or referring to. The Literary Gothic uses frames, so when you go to a particular author page, you will not see the proper URL in the address window of your browser, provided that you are viewing this site through its frameset. (If there's a menu on the left side of your screen, you're in the frameset. If you found your author page by Googling, you're probably looking at only the author page, in which case your browser window will show the correct URL. But read on....) For example, if you navigate to the F. Marion Crawford page of this site, you'll see "http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/authors.html" in the address window. That's the address of the frameset page, not the Crawford page. To determine the URL of that page, you'd need to open it in a new browser window or view the frame or document source or properties, all of which you can access by right-clicking your mouse. To make matters easier, I've begun adding the citation info to the bottom of author pages here at LitGothic, but it's going to take a while for all author pages to be modified.
So, how to cite?
The Literary Gothic is neither a "professional" site nor an "institutional" site (although I am a literary professional teaching at an accredited institution of higher learning), but it's also more - at least in my humble opinion - than a typical "personal" site. Please note that The Literary Gothic probably does not qualify as a "scholarly project" in the MLA sense because it is neither university supported nor is it peer reviewed. (If your assignment requires peer-reviewed sites, please note that pages from The Literary Gothic will not meet this requirement.) I guess this is where the MLA system gets a bit skanky....
Anyway, here's what I would recommend, based on a pretty scrupulous following of the MLA guidelines available at the link above; the example below assumes a citation of the F. Marion Crawford page at The Literary Gothic:
Voller, Jack G. "F. Marion Crawford." The Literary Gothic. {date of last update, if available,
without the curly brackets}. {date you accessed the page, without the curly
brackets}. <http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/crawford.html>
(The last bit of information, the address or URL of the page, is indeed to be enclosed in angle brackets. And note the funky indentation; that too is per MLA style, which really does need to get caught up.) This citation looks more like an article citation than a personal homepage, to be sure, but I think it more accurately reflects the reality of the website. If in doubt, or if your teacher is particularly rigorous in such matters, consult your instructor before submitting your final draft.
The Modern Language Association (MLA) provides detailed guidelines covering all aspects of writing scholarly research papers; they are far too copious to be considered here. If you're interested, the full set of specification for this "MLA Style" is to be found only in their hardcopy publications The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (5th ed., 1999) and in the second edition of The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2nd ed., 1998); you can, however, get some info directly from the MLA on citing Web resources.
Best of luck....
To LitGothic's "Doing Gothic Research" page
or
back where you came from....