Imagining Toronto isn’t a study of literary Toronto. Rather, it’s a study of how the city has been described and revealed in and through literature. Amy Lavender Harris, a geographer at York University, gives us her compass bearings at the beginning. She examines works both revered and forgotten because, together, they “represent the only reliable map to the city within the city, the city at the centre of the map.” Her mission is to do more than simply “inventory thematic dimensions of this city’s literary culture.”

Yet a thematic approach can’t be avoided, as she surveys how Toronto authors have creatively metabolized class, sexuality, immigration, the rise of the suburbs, and so on. Harris evidently loves the noise, motion, and crazy, polyglot nature of the place. (We discover that she is of “Aboriginal and Anglo-Saxon ancestry,” while her husband was born in Romania but reared in the Middle East, and the couple’s daughter “is a city child, born into a landscape of gleaming high rises, graffiti-stained alleys and verdant ravines.”)

Harris covers everyone you would expect: Morley Callaghan, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Michaels, Matt Cohen – the list is long. But far more interesting are her interpretations of books now only faintly remembered, such as Phyllis Brett Young’s 1960 novel The Torontonians (re-released by McGill-Queens University Press in 2007), one of the first works of Canadian literature to make art out of the suburbs. Still more rewarding are Harris’s descriptions of the city’s earliest fictional incarnations in the mid-19th century and the boomlet in Toronto novels in the first few years of the 20th century.

Only once or twice does she seem wide of the mark. Hugh Garner, for instance, was never “internationally regarded” (in fact, he was barely tolerated domestically). And one can hardly call Gwendolyn MacEwen “undeservedly neglected” while simultaneously noting her canonical status, Rosemary Sullivan’s biography, and the public park named in her honour (complete with a bust). These examples aside, this is a wise, thoughtful, and careful book, complete with some insights that bear repeating. “Despite the contemporary city’s size and sophistication,” Harris writes with rueful accuracy, “Torontonians remain rather quaintly prone to promoting self-aggrandizing myths designed to bolster civic self-image while concealing a neurotic sense of insecurity.” – George Fetherling, author of Walt Whitman’s Secret (Random House Canada).