MLA citation help please?

Question

I have two different text books for one class and they are both anthologies with the works of many different authors. I am writing a paper about Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics... half of which is in one book and the other half is in the other book... so I have to cite them both. But, when you cite a work from an anthology your in-text citation is the name of the author of the work... not the editor of the anthology. So... for either book it will just be (Aristotle + page number). It doesn't seem right that the citation will be exactly the same for either book. How will they know what book it came from? Does it matter?

Answer 1

The way I see it, you have to identify the book (anthology), otherwise your page numbers make no sense. (For example: assume you have a 10-page work but because it is in a collected work you cite pages 50-60. There's no sense to Page 50 unless you identify the book of collected works.)

Your citations need to identify not only Aristotle but also the book you got it from (by title and editor(s)). (As there may be a difference in translations from the ancient Greek text, yes it does matter.) Here are examples of citations for an article in a collection by several authors, with one or more editors:
6 Carmen DaSilva, "Life Insurance as a Tool for Estate Planning," Death and Taxes: Beating One of the Two Certainties in Life, ed. Jerry White (Toronto: Warwick, 1998) 57-71.

6 Maryann G. Valiulis, "Power, Gender and Identity in the Irish Free State," Irish Women's Voices Past and Present, ed. Joan Hoff and Moureen Coulter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1995) 118.

Answer 2

That's a tough one. You have a good point. I checked my MLA 5th edition guide, and couldn't find anything. Nor did an internet search pull up anything. The closest I could come to a solution is the same author, multiple work rule, where you include one word from the title to differentiate things.

I don't think anybody will slam you for getting this wrong...since it is so tricky, the most you should be asked to do is fix it if you are wrong...but this is what I would do:

Since the authors are the same, and the book titles are the same, I would use the rule on same author, multiple works, but instead of one word from the title, include the year of publication. Hopefully at least that is different.

(Aristotle, 1998 170)

Good luck in whatever route you choose!

Answer 3

Hi,

Are the page ranges of the Aristotle work identical in both textbooks? On your Works Cited page, you will have the page range of the excerpt at the end of the reference for each book. (See example below):

Author’s surname, first name. “Title of Work.” Title of Anthology. Ed. Editor’s first name surname. Place of publication: Publisher, year of publication. Start page-end page.

If the page ranges are different, the reader should be able to tell which book it's from by the page number.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

This will do it all for you. Good luck.