The public is invited to join Julia Spicher Kasdorf on April 19, 4–5 p.m., in the Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, for a presentation on Fred Lewis Pattee’s novel, “The House of the Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains.”
Pattee, long regarded as the father of American literary study, also wrote fiction. Originally published in 1905 by Henry Holt, this book was Pattee’s second novel—a local-color romance set in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. The plot is driven by family feud, forbidden love, and a touch of the supernatural. This recent edition from the Penn State Press, available at http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-05420-9.html, makes the novel accessible to new generations of modern-day readers as a thriller that preserves details of rural life and language during the late nineteenth century. Scholars will read it as an expression of cultural anxiety and change in the decades after the Civil War. Continue reading