Founded in 1901, University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business subject areas.
UTP is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.
Highlights
Signs of the Material World
The book sets Fyodor Dostoevsky in complex opposition to his fellow writers, Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, while also exploring the formal connections that he shares with contemporaries across Europe and the United States, including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Friedrich Schiller. Melissa Frazier argues that Dostoevsky’s art serves as his science, both in his reliance on plot and in his recourse to an often-extravagant figurative language.
This combined literary and scientific practice reflects Dostoevsky’s transnational and interdisciplinary reading; it also transforms our own. In George Eliot’s words, Dostoevsky “changes the lights for us.” Once drawn into his orbit, Eliot herself no longer looks quite the same. Finally, Signs of the Material World argues that Eliot and Dostoevsky’s particular strain of nineteenth-century materialism lends itself to an ambivalent political stance, as they both confront the certainties of social utopianism with a deliberate embrace of ambiguity.
Winner - Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award
Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods
Music was an integral part of statecraft and identity formation in the Third Reich. Structured thematically and semiotically around the Wagnerian tetralogy of the Ring cycle, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods provides a sonic read of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Alexandra Birch sheds light on the specific type of music promoted under Nazism, linked to larger Teutonic mythologies and histories espoused in rhetoric and personal styling. The book explores the musical fixation of the command as it was extended to the ordinary troops of the Wehrmacht and SS in instances of musical sadism and destruction during the Holocaust. It reveals how, in constructing what was “German,” this process also intentionally fashioned a subaltern other with an assigned set of music and aesthetics. The book draws on analysis of testimony and perpetrator documents to reveal the execution of this binary identity and the inclusion of music even in extreme genocidal conditions. From drinking games in the interwar period, to musical sadism in the Holocaust, to the final delusions of the command in collapse, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods illuminates how music was a component of camaraderie, identity, masculinity, and warfare.
A Character Named Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes, writer of Don Quixote, has frequently been portrayed in fictionalized contexts across various mediums. In A Character Named Cervantes, Howard Mancing and Tatevik Gyulamiryan explore how Cervantes's life is depicted in biographies and fiction and how he, as a (bio)fictional character, contributes to our understanding of reality and fiction, fact and invention, history and imagination, and above all, our perceptions of these concepts.
The book reveals that Cervantes's life was unlike anyone else's. Characterized by an array of extraordinary experiences – both triumphant and tumultuous, adventurous and misfortunate, impassioned and disillusioned – his life events mirror the quixotic spirit he famously imbued in his iconic character. Despite the wealth of documented events, a lot about Cervantes remains uncovered, which allows for human imagination, interpretation, and creation to intervene, attempting to provide a more comprehensive biography. The book highlights how Cervantes's life has inspired multiple interpretations and recreations by historians, biographers, and novelists alike. It emphasizes the crucial role of human imagination in the crafting of biographies, particularly within literary and scholarly traditions. Ultimately, A Character Named Cervantes examines Cervantes through the dual lenses of fiction and fictionalized history.
