The Imagining Toronto project represents the first full effort to inventory and evaluate how Toronto is represented in the city’s literature. Although several anthologies of Toronto stories have appeared in print, among them William Kilborn’s The Toronto Book (Macmillan, 1976), Morris Wolfe & Douglas Daymond’s Toronto Short Stories (Doubleday, 1977), Cary Fagan & Robert MacDonald’s Streets of Attitude (Yonge & Bloor, 1990) and Barry Callaghan’s This Ain’t No Healing Town (Exile, 1995), concerted attention has never been paid to what Toronto literature has to say about the city itself.
In fact, for many years there was a widely held view that Toronto had no literature at all, or that even if it did have a literature, it couldn’t possibly be worthy of critical interest. Critics have claimed, for example, that Toronto is “a city that exists in no one’s imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world,” that “Toronto is a place people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination,”[1] and that “there’s a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place.”[2] One journalist wrote flatly of the “bland and featureless reputation” of Toronto’s literary landscape and insisted that “our city awaits its great novelist.”[3]
At the same time, other commentators have claimed that “Torlit” has supplanted Canadian literature, alleging that the concentration of publishers and the popular press in Toronto has given the city and its writers an unfair advantage with respect to publishing, sales and capturing the attention of literary prize juries.[4] [5]
In reality, neither of these claims has much validity. Toronto is a richly imagined city, albeit one whose literature has been unjustly understudied. This is, of course, where the Imagining Toronto project comes in.
- To browse an expanding and regularly updated catalogue of literary works engaging with Toronto, please visit the Imagining Toronto Library.
- To view the syllabus and lecture materials for the Imagining Toronto course, please click here.
- To learn more about the Imagining Toronto book (Mansfield Press, 2o10), please click here.
[1] Bert Archer, “Making a Toronto of the Imagination” in uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto (Toronto: Coach House, 2005), page 220.
[2] Andrew Pyper, 2006. “Facts and Fiction: A round table discussion on Toronto literature with Sheila Heti, Andrew Pyper and Shyam Selvadurai,” Toronto Life.
[3] Reference Philip Marchand, 5 November 2006. “What’s Toronto’s Story,” Toronto Star.
[4] Reference Stephen Henighan, “Kingmakers.” Geist, no. 63.
[5] Reference Stephen Henighan, “Vulgarity on Bloor: Literary Institutions From CanLit to TorLit,” in When Words Deny the World. (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill,2002): 157-178.