New Releases by Michael Todd

An affectionately candid and spirited account of the tumultuous life of the famed impresario whose career, begun in Minneapolis, stretched from Broadway to Hollywood and encompassed a dazzling array of entertainment events

"Radical" prose romance is that fictional form which is firmly based on the root structures and conventions of romance narrative. Unlike the "novelized" romance, which has been displaced by the mimetic patterns of the novel in the direction of realism, radical romance (as it is developed into a modern form by Morris and MacDonald) is "re-displaced" in the direction of myth and customarily involves an "other-world" journey beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience. As a fictional form, the genre is highly conventional and must be approached from a critical perspective based on its own formative principles rather than the alien critical perspective of the novel. Consequently, this study begins with an analysis of the principal structural features of the genre. The general framework of this analysis is Aristotelean and centers around the mythos, ethos, lexis, and dianoia of the genre. Mythos is, of course, the heart of romance, and the typical narrative structure is a processional sequence of adventures which follow a tri-part pattern of leaving, adventure and return. The central events take place in a "fabulous" realm in which formal conventions and motifs serve to ritualize the pattern of adventure. Ethos in romance will be subordinated to mythos, though in the modern form of the genre there is invariably an interest in the archetypal dimensions of character. As in Spenser and Morris, lexis will be a formal embellishment and will serve to clarify the distance between the real and the fictional. The "meaning" of the romance quest results from the author''s development of the symbolic patterns implicit in the ritual journey, and conceptual implications will typically be carried in highly charged patterns of imagery. The dianoia of the genre as a whole may be schematized in accordance with the allegorical levels common to patristic exegesis. In other words, the literal story may be developed against a background of social, psychological or mythological ideas; or it may involve all three, since the symbolic techniques of the genre are capable of multiple, simultaneous, or polysemious implications. The distinction between the "novelized" and "radical" forms of modern prose romance becomes clarified in a survey of "the progress of romance" in England between 1750 and 1850. The Gothic romance, the Waverley Novels and the interplay between novel and romance in the early 19th-century are part of this survey. With this historical background established, the study turns to a close textual analysis of the major prose romances of Morris and MacDonald. MacDonald''s Phantastes (1858) is examined for its development of the traditional generic structures as they are adapted to the "internalized" form of the quest romance. As a descent into the unconscious, this romance naturally gravitates towards psychological themes, which are given form through the narrative and symbolic methods of the genre. In Lilith (1895), these same structural features are organized by a dominating pattern of ascent, and psychological themes merge with anagogical ones. Morris''s career as a writer is a survey in itself of various romance traditions, and his early works are outlined as an introduction to two of his late prose romances: The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Well at the World''s End (1896). The former combines an almost classical simplicity of structure with a modern concern for the complexities of sexuality. The latter work provides an opportunity to examine the polysemious development of political, psychological and mythological themes within the organizing framework of the other-world romance.

A history of the Brotherhood war of 1890 using newspaper sources of the time, such as the New York Times.