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 Purdue's Online Writing Center or the MLA's site. Since The Literary Gothic is a personal site, sort of (more on this below), this guide covers only that format.

Note: MLA style has changed; what appears here reflects the new (as of April 2009) guidelines.

MLA style no longer requires inclusion of the web address (the "URL" or "URI") of the page you're quoting from or referring to, and that simplifies things, particularly regarding sites, such as The Literary Gothic, which use frames.


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.)

Anyway, here's what I would recommend, based on a pretty scrupulous following of the MLA guidelines: creator's name, name of site, date of last modification, medium in which material appears, then your date of access.

Here's what that actually looks like, using LitGothic's F. Marion Crawford page as an example (the dates are for illustration only):

Voller, Jack G. "F. Marion Crawford." The Literary Gothic. 14 July 2010. Web. 22 August 2011.


To make matters easier, I've added full MLA style citation information to the bottom of all author pages here at LitGothic; all you need to do is copy and paste.

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 (7th ed., 2009) and The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (3rd ed., 2008).

Best of luck....


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