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MLA Works Cited for Collections of Short Stories

The Modern Language Association gives its guidelines to humanities authors in "The Modern Language Association Handbook." These guidelines include general stylistic advice, formatting requirements and specifications for citing sources. You will need to create a works cited entry for each individual story you reference in your paper. If you discuss both "An Encounter" and "Araby," two stories from James Joyce's collection "Dubliners," you will have to create two works cited entries.

  1. Name and Story Title

    • Modern Language Association works cited entries for short stories begin with the author's last name separated by a comma from his first name. The title of the story enclosed in quotation marks follows. MLA style dictates that if a writer cites more than one story by an author, she should use the author's last and first name for the first entry and two hyphens followed by a period in each subsequent entry.

      Joyce, James. "Araby."

      --. "An Encounter."

    Collection Title

    • Titles of all books, including short story collections, appear in italics in MLA-style works cited pages. The title of a short story collection follows the name of the individual story the writer is citing. With many classic short story collections, such as Joyce's "Dubliners" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales," that are currently in the public domain and available in editions from multiple publishers, the year the collection was originally published often comes after the collection title.

      Joyce, James. "Araby." Dubliners. 1914.

    Publication Information

    • MLA works cited entries for books always contain the following information: the place of publication, the name of the publishing firm and the year of publication. This allows readers to track down the exact edition of a work the writer is referring to. It protects writers from accusations of error in cases where the editors of different editions do not use the same source texts or make different editorial decisions about unclear passages.

      Joyce, James. "Araby." Dubliners. 1914. New York: Norton, 2003.

    Print or Web?

    • Beginning with the seventh edition of the "Modern Language Association Handbook," MLA style has required writers to specify whether they have accessed their sources in print or electronically. When an author is using a print edition, she simply writes "Print" at the end of the citation. If the source of the text is electronic, she gives the source of the electronic text, writes "Web" and gives the date she last accessed the text.

      Joyce, James. "Araby." Dubliners. 1914. New York: Norton, 2003. Print.

      Joyce, James. "Araby." Dubliners. 1914. New York: Norton, 2003. Google Books. Web. 28 Jun. 2011.

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