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Honors British Literature ENGL 2323 - Holton - Fall 2024: Constructing Your Paper

Library resources to assist in research for Gothic Literature

Online Tutorials

Need help constructing your paper? Consider these tutorials! Each one takes less than ten minutes to complete. 

Still need help? Every ACC campus has a Learning Lab where skilled tutors (who may be ACC professors!) can help you format your paper. Check out the Learning Lab schedule for the campus nearest you or try online tutoring, now available via Zoom from the Learning Lab!

In-Text (Parenthetical) Citations in MLA

Citations in the middle of your paper are called in-text or parenthetical citations. You will use in-text citations whenever you:

  • provide a direct quote from a source
  • use anything that is not your original thought or opinion

ACC Library Services provides a nice overview for parenthetical citations including examples. 

Say you want to use this source material for your paper. You can use the entire quote, called a block quote, but make sure you follow the correct formatting. 

In the case of Dracula, the context includes the decline of Britain as a world power at the close of the nineteenth century; or rather, the way the perception of that decline was articulated by contemporary writers. Dracula appeared in a Jubilee year, but one marked by considerably more introspection and less self-congratulation than the celebration of a decade earlier. The decay of British global influence, the loss of overseas markets for British goods, the economic and political rise of Germany and the United States, the increasing unrest in British colonies and possessions, the growing domestic uneasiness over the morality of imperialism - all combined to erode Victorian confidence in the inevitability of British progress and hegemony.  Late-Victorian fiction in particular is saturated with the sense that the entire nation - as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power - was in irretrievable decline (Arata, 622).

You can also use it as a parenthetical citation in the following ways:

  • You can directly quote the entire piece or a part of it. For that, add quotation marks around the part you want to use, the author, and the page number, if applicable. 

"Late-Victorian fiction in particular is saturated with the sense that the entire nation - as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power - was in irretrievable decline (Arata, 622)."

  • You can also include the author's name as a way to introduce the work. 

Arata suggests that the decline of the British Empire created the right amount of "fear in the civilized world' is on the point of being colonized by 'primitive' forces."(623)

  • You can also write an inference where you give the title of the work and the author name but no direct quote/s. 

In Stephen Arata's article "The Occidental Tourist: 'Dracula' and the anxiety of reverse colonization", Arata posits that the decline of the British Empire was a prime catalyst to stoke fear among Victorians, creating the perfect environment to introduce one of literature's greatest monsters.(622) 

The citation for the Works Cited page for this source is created automatically using the Cite feature in the database. 

Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1990, pp. 621–45. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.

Citing Sources

Each ACC Library has a copy of the MLA (Modern Language Association) Handbook for Writers of Research Papers in the Reference collection (REF LB 2369 .G53 2016) for use in the library and copies in the circulating collection (LB 2369 .G53 2016) that you can check out. For now, check out the online resources for MLA.

You can also create citations using generators. Remember: it's your responsibility to double check the citations for accuracy!


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