Postgraduate stylesheet

These notes provide information and guidance on style which you are requested to follow in preparing your essays and your dissertation. These style conventions follow those of the MHRA Style Book, fifth edition (London, Modern Humanities Research Association, 1996), to which reference may be made (see sections 1, 4--12, 16 and 18 in particular). You should consult in detail with your supervisor regarding the organization and writing of your work and you should refer to the guidance issued by the Student Records and Examinations Office regarding the layout of M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. dissertations.. The final form of your work is your own responsibility. You should seek to ensure that your typescript is clear, correct and consistent. In preparing your typescript, you should follow the guidance provided on using a word-processor.

Typescript

The text of your essay or dissertation must be clearly legible with double-spacing throughout (except for quotations which are set off (see Quotations and references below) and for notes), and ample margins. Each paragraph (except the opening paragraph) should be indented and the practice of leaving a blank line between paragraphs should not be followed. Notes should as a rule be printed as footnotes. Remember to number the pages of your work. In your dissertation, footnotes should be numbered separately within each chapter.
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Spelling

For preferred forms of spelling in English and of abbreviations, see The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981). For verbs ending in -ize or -ise, the -ize form should be used (but analyse and its derivatives have s, not z). The spelling of quotations should always follow that of the work or the edition cited. Note, however, that in quotations from early printed sources the letters i and j, u and v, the ampersand (&) and other abbreviations should as a rule be normalized to modern usage (such changes may be mentioned in a note on the first occasion where a source of this sort is cited).

The possessive of proper nouns ending in -s or, in French, in -s, -x, or -z, should take the following form:

For place names and proper nouns, French forms (e.g. François I^er, Henri IV, Lyon, Reims) should be used as appropriate. Current English forms should otherwise be used (e.g. Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, St John of the Cross). Where words and phrases in French or in a foreign language are used, they should be given in italics (e.g. œuvre, écriture féminine, film noir, roman-fleuve, Nachträglichkeit, verstehen, verismo). Words which have passed into English usage should not be italicized (e.g. persona, milieu). In cases of doubt, reference should be made to The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors.
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Capitalization

Capital letters should be used sparingly; when in doubt, use lower case. Capitals are used for historical events and periods (e.g. the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the July Monarchy), for parts of books (e.g. Chapter 1, Part iv), and for literary, cultural or philosophical movements (e.g. Naturalism, Surrealism). With the exception of à, accents should be retained on capital letters in French (e.g. L’Éducation sentimentale, L’Âge d’homme). Care should be taken to use initial capitals with nouns in German (e.g. Angst, Aufhebung). For the use of capitals with titles, see Quotations and references below.
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Abbreviations

Care should be taken to ensure that the use of abbreviations does not result in confusion or opacity. Where a given work or edition is frequently cited in an essay or dissertation, an abbreviation may be used to refer to its title (e.g. MB, for Madame Bovary, O.c., for Œuvres complètes). The use of such abbreviations should be mentioned in the first note where the work or edition in question is cited. In the text of essays or dissertations, abbreviations should be avoided, as in the following examples:

Standard abbreviations should otherwise be used (e.g. p. 191, pp. 23–27. ll. 1241–53, 2 vols, i.e.). The full point is omitted in capitalized abbreviations for standard works of reference or for journals and other publications (e.g. FEW, FS, TLS), or for countries, institutions and organizations (e.g. UK, USA, BNF, CNRS).
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Gender

Authors may wish to avoid the use of gender-specific language. The preferred forms are ‘he/she’, ‘his/her’, ‘him/her’. The use of he should not be qualified, however, where the material under discussion is clearly gender-specific (e.g. where reference is made, for historical reasons, exclusively to men).
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Numbers and dates

For dates, the following form should be used: 26 September 1859. In approximations, circa should be abbreviated to c. (e.g. c. 1762).

Numbers up to one hundred should be written in words. Figures should be used for chapter, volume or page numbers, and for years. Page references to numbers falling within the same hundred should take the following form:

Numbers up to four digits are given without a comma (e.g. line 1672). In all multiple page references, the range given should be specific (references in the form 22f. or 44ff. should not be given).
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Quotations and references

Authors are urged to aim for economy in the use of quotations. All quotations from works in French should be given in the original and published translations of works written in French should not be used. Quotations in languages other than English or French should generally be given in translation, though reference may, of course, be made to original sources. Where the argument requires that a text written in a language other than English or French be quoted in the original, a translation should be provided in a note. For classical authors, texts published in the Loeb Classical Library should generally be used, except in cases where a different standard translation exists. Where no translation is available, one should be provided by the author. In essays and dissertations written in English, all quotation marks should be normalized to English usage.

Short quotations (up to about forty words in length) should be run on from the main text and given in single quotation marks. For a quotation within a quotation, double quotation marks should be used:

An initial capital letter may be reduced to lower case without the use of brackets to indicate such an amendment:

Note that the full point is placed outside the closing quotation mark; an exclamation or a question mark should, however, be retained as part of a quotation:

Where a page reference is given, the final full point should follow the closing parenthesis:

The full point should precede the closing quotation mark only where the passage quoted represents a complete sentence introduced by a colon:

Omissions within quotations should be indicated by means of ellipsis (that is, three points within brackets):

Longer quotations (that is, more than about forty words of prose, or more than one complete prose paragraph, or more than two lines of verse) should be broken off from the main text and presented without quotation marks. A longer quotation should close with a full point and any page reference should be placed after the full point:

Revenons, c’est une nécessité de ce livre, sur ce fatal champ de bataille.
Le 18 juin 1815, c’était pleine lune. Cette clarté favorisa la poursuite féroce de Blücher, dénonça les traces des fuyards, livra cette masse désastreuse à la cavalerie prussienne acharnée, et aida au massacre. Il y a parfois dans les catastrophes de ces tragiques complaisances de la nuit. (i, 427)

In referring to and quoting from published works, recent standard authoritative editions should be used, where these exist. In the case of contemporary works, the original edition (or a substantially revised edition, where one exists) should be used. References should be given according to the author-title system and will generally be given in notes. The author-date (or Harvard) system is not used in the journal and complete lists of sources used should therefore not be given. Major critical or secondary works should be cited in standard editions (e.g. all references to Freud in English translation should be to the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. by James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London, Hogarth, 1953–74)).

Notes should be kept to a minimum. They should not be used to provide bibliographical information on sources which are not directly relevant to the argument. Pages references to a text which is the main focus of discussion may be provided in parentheses in the body of the essay or dissertation, provided that this practice is explained in the first note citing the text in question. A note reference number should as a rule be placed at the end of the sentence (after the full point), except where it falls within parentheses and the note refers only to the parenthesis.

The following references illustrate the style conventions followed in the journal (note that the full name of an author should be given only where this information is not contained in the body of the essay or dissertation, and that full bibliographical information should be given only on first mention in the notes of the work in question):

Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1975–76), i, 1311.
Alfred de Vigny, Œuvres complètes, i, Poésie — Théâtre, ed. by François Germain and André Jarry (Paris, Gallimard, 1986), p. 434.
Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Lines of Thought: Discourse, Architectonics, and the Origin of Modern Philosophy (Durham, NC — London, Duke University Press, 1996), p. 111.
Erec R. Koch, Pascal and Rhetoric: Figural and Persuasive Language in the Scientific Treatises, the ‘Provinciales’, and the ‘Pensées’ (Charlottesville, Rookwood Press, 1997), ch. 4.
Leo Bersani, The Death of Stéephane Mallarmé (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 14.
Christiane Marchello-Nizia, L’Évolution du français: ordre des mots, démonstratifs, accent tonique (Paris, Armand Colin, 1995), pp. 200–08.
Bernard Vouilloux, Un art de la figure: Francis Ponge dans l’atelier du peintre (Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998), p. 212.
Werner Helmich, Der moderne französische Aphorismus. Innovation und Gattungsreflexion (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1991), p. iv.
Paola Salerni, La scena di una scrittura: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam fra teatro e romanzo (Fasano, Schena, 1997), ch.3.
Jean Starobinski, ‘La littérature: le texte et l’interprète’, in Faire de l’histoire, iii, Nouvelles approches, ed. by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris, Gallimard, 1974), pp. 225–44 (p. 226).
Jane Gallop, ‘French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism’, Paragraph, 8 (1986), 19–24.
Marc Fumaroli, ‘Rhétorique d’école et rhétorique adulte: remarques sur la réception européenne du traité Du sublime au XVI^e et au XVII^e siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 86 (1986), 33–51 (p. 45).

The title and subtitle should be separated by a colon, except with titles in German, where a full point is used (see example (viii)). For titles of books and of articles or essays in English, the initial word and the principal words in the title are capitalized (see examples (iii), (iv) and (xi)). Titles within the title of a book should be given in single quotations marks (see example (iv)). The place of publication should be given where practicable in English (e.g. Geneva, not Genève). The place of publication may be omitted where it is indicated by the publisher’s name (see example (v)). The names of American states should be included only where necessary to eliminate ambiguity (see example (iii)); these abbreviations should be given according to the two-letter postal abbreviations which are to be found in the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. For titles of books in French, the first word is capitalized (see example (vii)). If the first word is the definite article, the first noun following the article (and any adjectives between the article and the noun) should also be capitalized (see example (vi)); the subtitle should be given entirely in lower case. Only the first word in the title of essays and articles in French should be capitalized (see examples (x), (xii) and (xiii)). Titles of series in which a work appears are not given and information concerning editors of works should be normalized to the abbreviation ‘ed. by’ (see examples (i), (ii) and (x)). Where use is made only of one volume of a multi-volume edition or work, the reference should be styled accordingly (see examples (ii) and (x)). For titles in German, all nouns should be capitalized (see example (viii); in Italian and Spanish, only the first word is normally capitalized (see example (ix)).

Your essay or dissertation should include a bibliography giving details in separate sections of all primary and secondary sources used. Entries in the bibliography should be styled in accordance with the sources listed under Further reading below.
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Style and the presentation of written work