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World Film Locations
Toronto
Tom Ue
Intellect Books, 2014
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 ManAmerican 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.
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Fan Phenomena
Sherlock Holmes
Tom Ue
Intellect Books, 2014
Few could have predicted the enduring fascination with the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. From the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the recent BBC series that has made a heartthrob out of Benedict Cumberbatch, the sleuth has been much a part of the British and global cultural legacy from the moment of his first appearance in 1887.

The contributors to this book discuss the ways in which various fan cultures have sprung up around the stories and how they have proved to be a strong cultural paradigm for the ways in which phenomena functions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Essays explore the numerous adaptations, rewritings, rip-offs, role-playing, wiki and crowdsourced texts, virtual realities, and faux scholarship Sherlock Holmes has inspired. Though fervid fan behavior is often mischaracterized as a modern phenomenon, the historical roots of fan manifestations that have been largely forgotten are revived in this thrilling book.

Complete with interviews with writers who have famously brought the character of Holmes back to life, the collection benefits from the vast knowledge of its contributors, including academics who teach in the field, archivists, and a number of writers who have been involved in the enactment of Holmes stories on stage, screen, and radio. The release of Fan Phenomena: Sherlock Holmes coincides with Holmes’s 160th birthday, so it is no mystery that it will make a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on this timeless detective.
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The Friday Mosque in the City
Liminality, Ritual, and Politics
A. Hilâl Ugurlu
Intellect Books, 2020

This edited volume explores the dynamic relationship between the Friday mosque and the Islamic city, addressing the traditional topics through a fresh new lens and offering a critical examination of each case study in its own spatial, urban, and socio-cultural context. While these two well-known themes—concepts that once defined the field—have been widely studied by historians of Islamic architecture and urbanism, this compilation specifically addresses the functional and spatial ambiguity or liminality between these spaces. 

Instead of addressing the Friday mosque as the central signifier of the Islamic city, this collection provides evidence that there was (and continues to be) variety in the way architectural borders became fluid in and around Friday mosques across the Islamic world, from Cordoba to Jerusalem and from London to Lahore. By historicizing different cases and exploring the way human agency, through ritual and politics, shaped the physical and social fabric of the city, this volume challenges the generalizing and reductionist tendencies in earlier scholarship.

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We Europeans?
Media, Representations, Identities
William Uricchio
Intellect Books, 2009
We Europeans? explores the relationship between media and identity along the fault lines and fissures of the shifting ethnicities, religions, tastes, generations, and languages that make up contemporary Europe. Addressing topics such as film, television, public monuments, and the press, an international group of contributors reveal how European identity is shaped as the continent administratively consolidates. In essays that explore cultural homogenization, longed-for identities, and the fears surrounding transnational media, this volume uncovers the intricate interactions of history and memory as they inform the European present.
 
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