Books published by University of Toronto Press

By applying the techniques of linguistic anthropology to the pre-history of medicine, anatomical knowledge, and law, Lisi Oliver has produced a remarkable study that sheds new light on early Germanic conceptions of the body in terms of medical value, physiological function, psychological worth, and social significance.

Lyrical, mysterious, and laden with symbolism, Franz Kafka’s novels and stories have been translated into more than forty languages ranging from Icelandic to Japanese. In Transforming Kafka, Patrick O’Neill approaches these texts through the method he pioneered in Polyglot Joyce and Impossible Joyce, considering the many translations of each work as a single, multilingual “macrotext.”Examining three novels – The Trial, The Castle, and America – and two short stories – “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” – O’Neill offers comparative readings that consider both intertextual and intratextual themes. His innovative approach shows how comparing translations extends and expands the potential meanings of the text and reveals the subtle differences among the hundreds of translations of Kafka’s work. A sophisticated analysis of the ways in which translation shapes, rearranges, and expands our understanding of literary works, Transforming Kafka is a unique approach to reading the works of a literary giant.

Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann is known as a major figure in phenomenological and hermeneutics research: he was Martin Heidegger’s personal assistant for the last ten years of Heidegger’s life, and assistant to Eugen Fink, who in turn was primary assistant to Edmund Husserl. However, his own philosophical commentaries and readings of Heidegger’s work are not familiar to many in the English-speaking world.Von Herrmann’s Hermeneutics and Reflection, translated here from the original German, represents the most fundamental and critical reflection in any language of the concept of phenomenology as it was used by Heidegger and by Husserl. It provides a careful rendition of Husserl’s essential contribution to phenomenology, then draws a clear demarcation between Husserl’s reflective phenomenology and Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. While showing the fullest respect for Husserl’s phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Reflection offers a full-fledged critique of Husserl from the perspective of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology.

Colette A. Granger's highly original book considers moments in several areas of education in which silence may serve as both a response to difficulty and a means of working through it. The author, a teacher educator, presents narratives and other textual artefacts from her own experiences of learning and instruction. She analyses them from multiple perspectives to reveal how the qualities of education's silences can make them at once difficult to observe and challenging to think about.Silent Moments in Education combines autoethnography with psychoanalytic theory and critical discourse analysis in a unique consideration of the relations teachers and learners forge with knowledge, with ideas, and with one another. This provocative and thoughtful work invites scholars and educators to consider the multiple silences of participants in education, and to respond to them with generosity and compassion.

The first comprehensive study of Spanish writings on East and Southeast Asia from the Spanish colonial period, They Need Nothing draws attention to many essential but understudied Spanish-language texts from this era. Robert Richmond Ellis provides an engaging, interdisciplinary examination of how these writings depict Asia and Asians as both similar to and different from Europe and Europeans, and details how East and Southeast Asians reacted to the Spanish presence in Asia.They Need Nothing highlights texts related to Japan, China, Cambodia, and the Philippines, beginning with Francis Xavier’s observations of Japan in the mid-sixteenth century and ending with José Rizal’s responses to the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Ellis provides a groundbreaking expansion of the geographical and cultural contours of Hispanism that bridges the fields of European, Latin American, and Asian Studies.

In classical and early modern rhetoric, to write or speak using the voice of a dead individual is known as eidolopoeia. Whether through ghost stories, journeys to another world, or dream visions, Renaissance writers frequently used this rhetorical device not only to co-opt the authority of their predecessors but in order to express partisan or politically dangerous arguments.In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia. Expanding the study of Renaissance eidolopoeia beyond the well-known cases of the shades in Dante’s Commedia and the spirits of Boccaccio’s De casibus vivorum illustrium, Roush examines many other appearances of famous ghosts – invocations of Boccaccio by Vincenzo Bagli and Jacopo Caviceo, Girolamo Malipiero’s representation of Petrarch in Limbo, and Girolamo Benivieni’s ghostly voice of Pico della Mirandola. Through close readings of these eidolopoetic texts, she illuminates the important role that this rhetoric played in the literary, legal, and political history of Renaissance Italy.

This book recounts the many and varied transformations in the history of law in Canada in the half century after Confederation.

This book shares the life story of William Playfair, the father of statistical graphics, who experienced extreme ups and downs in his various careers, including as a statistician, economist, and fraudster.

Onscreen/Offscreen is an ethnographic study of the ontological politics of cinema in South India.

This revised and expanded bibliography introduces readers to the vast and illustrious scholarly career of Paul Robert Magocsi, the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto.