World Film Locations: Toronto Tom Ue (Dalhousie University, Canada) 9781783201952

Toronto is a changing city that has been a source of reflection and inspiration to writers and artists whose work focuses on the conditions and prospects of human life. A city on the move, it demands policies and regulation, and it offers the pleasures and perils of the massive and the anonymous. As a site of study, the city is inherently multidisciplinary, with natural ties to history, geography, sociology, architecture, art history, literature and many other fields. World Film Locations: Toronto explores and reveals the relationship between the city and cinema using a predominately visual approach. The juxtaposition of the images used in combination with insightful essays helps to demonstrate the role that the city has played in a number of hit films, including Cinderella Man, American Psycho and X-Men and encourages the reader to frame an understanding of Toronto and the world around us. The contributors trace Toronto's emergence as an international city and demonstrate the narrative interests that it has continued to inspire among filmmakers, both Canadian and international. With support from experts in Canadian studies, the book's selection of films successfully shows the many facets of Toronto and also provides insider's access to a number of sites that are often left out of scholarship on Toronto in films, such as the Toronto International Film Festival. The 2014 release of this attractive volume will be a particularly welcome addition to the international celebrations of the city's 180th anniversary.

Tom Ue is Assistant Professor in English of the Long Nineteenth Century at Cape Breton University and Advising Editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James (University of Nebraska Press). He is the author of Gissing, Shakespeare, and the Life of Writing (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and George Gissing (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming); and the editor of George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). Professor Ue is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

'Much of Canada considers Toronto a place far too obsessed with money-making to consider anything less consequential, but World Film Locations: Toronto tells a different story. In essays and photos pulled together by Tom Ue, the editor, Toronto looks like a place of fantasies and dreams, where local myths flourish and major buildings encourage cinematic hallucinations.'

''World Film Locations: Toronto contains an array of voices and perspectives. Although it is fairly small, it offers something for everyone. It focuses on the city's growth over the past two decades while keeping an optimistic eye on its future. And it is slightly jumbled at times. In other words, it's more than a little bit like Toronto itself.''