Aviva Briefel is a professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Cornell University Press, 2006) and The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and coeditor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (University of Texas Press, 2011).
Aviva Briefel
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Writing on Public Books
Motherhood and Other Monsters
In The Babadook and The Need, the introduction of a monster amplifies preexisting anxieties, rather than generating fresh ones.
The Monstrous H. P. Lovecraft
Part literary detective story, part Gothic tale, and part fictional biography, Paul La Farge’s enthralling novel The Night Ocean is composed of the formal hybrids and …
Thornfield Hall, Brooklyn
On her author website, Patricia Park explains that her decision to revisit Jane Eyre in her debut novel, Re Jane, derives in part from the fact that, when she acted out as a child, her Korean mother “would say in her limited English, ‘You act like orphan!’” Park adds, “This always puzzled me—how can you […]
Game of Chance
The narrator of Alexandra Chasin’s novella, Brief, displays a close rhetorical kinship with Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. An art vandal of indeterminate gender, s/he defends an act of destruction inflicted on a work in the “midtown temple of Modern Art” through verbal flourishes that rival, and sometimes directly echo, the nymphet-lover’s pleas to his readers […]
