SED Expanded Reference Guide

When footnoting a book – either a primary text or secondary material – information such as the title and publication details should be given in the following order:

1. Author’s name (forename, surname, not abbreviated)

2. Title of book (in italics, in full, with all principal words capitalised)

3. Editor or translator (preceded by ‘ed. by’ or ‘trans. by’)

4. Edition (if other than the first, e.g. ‘2nd edn’, ‘rev. edn’)

5. Number of volumes in multi-volume publication (e.g. ‘5 vols’)

6. Details of publication, enclosed in parentheses, in this order and with this punctuation: (city of publication: publisher, date)

7. Volume number of the volume referred to (in capital roman numbers)

8. Page numbers (preceded by singular 'p.' or plural 'pp.' except when following a volume number)

All elements should be succeeded by a comma except when immediately preceding a parenthesis, and all footnotes should end with a full stop.

So footnotes for critical texts, including those written by a single author (monographs), should look like this:

1. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 61.
2. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), p. 80.
3. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 186.
4. Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
5. Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 58.

 Note:

• These are probably the easiest footnotes, just take care with the punctuation.
• Sometimes there will be different editions of critical texts and if you are using anything other than the first edition, include this information as in example five.

Footnotes for editions of primary texts should look like this:

1. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 212.
2. George Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. by David Carroll (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 72.
3. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 14.
4. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, trans. by William Weaver (London: Vintage 1998), p. 19
5. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd edn (London: J. Johnson, 1790); repr. in The Works of Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols, The Pickering Masters (London: William Pickering, 1989), V, 1-60 (p. 56).
6. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by R. B. McKerrow, 2nd edn, rev. by F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), III, 95-96.
7. Daniel C. Eddy, Ministering Women or Heroines of Missionary Enterprise: A Book for Young Ladies, Suitable for Sunday Reading ([n.p.]: Dean and Son, [n.d.]), p. ix.

Note:

• When selecting the edition of a primary text from which to quote, it is best practice to choose a good quality, academic edition that has been properly edited – as in examples one and two rather than example three.
• If you are quoting from an author’s collected works, as in example six, it is obvious who the author is, so there is no need to begin with the author’s name. 
• If the book you are quoting from is part of a series, include the series title and number, before the publishing information, as in example five – the Works are published as part of The Pickering Masters series. If the series is not numbered, it is not strictly necessary to include the series title, unless you consider it relevant to your point.
• When referring to a multi-volume work, the number of volumes is given in Arabic numerals (eg ‘5’), but the volume number to which you are referring is given in roman numerals before the page reference (which is not preceded by 'p.' or 'pp.'), as in examples five and six.
• If the work you are quoting is missing some publication information (this can be quite common in works published before 1900) use '[n.p.]' for ‘no place’ or 'no publisher' and '[n.d.]' for ‘no date’, as in example seven. If you have, or think you have the information that is missing (for example, from another source), you can include this in square brackets e.g. [1860], [1860?] instead.
• If you are quoting a work that was published as a complete text in book form originally, but is now being accessed through an edited volume of collected works, follow the form of example five: 'repr. in' stands for ‘reprinted in’, and the page range of the work within the volume is required as well as the specific page reference, which follows in parentheses.