The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century
"The Deceivers is engaging, persuasive, and both historically and critically illuminating. Aviva Briefel's prose is alive and unfailingly lucid. Her readings of a wide variety of texts are smart, nuanced, and rich. Briefel manages her diverse materials expertly, forging a cogent narrative of the place of the fake in a persistent social imaginary, one whose effects we still in some sense confront."-Ellen Rooney, Brown University"The book reads like a fascinating collection of obscure items, yet it is deceptively relevant. It tells a coherent story of the allure and impenetrability of artworks that are neither true nor false."-Kate Murray-Browne, Times Literary Supplement, January 19, 2007"Briefel's concise and elegant study is . . . about the 'rich rhetoric of forgery' that arose in the literature of that period in England, France, and the United States. Briefel sets out to identify the various identities created by this literature and to show how they reflected biases relating to 'categories of gender, class, race, and nationality.' . . . The Deceivers presents many original ideas on the complexities of fakery and identity, as well as an authoritative overview of previous scholarship. The text is enriched with a number of black and white illustrations from contemporaneous publications. Briefel's writing is as lively and humorous as that from Punch, making this book a pleasure to read."-Julie L'Enfant, Journal of British Studies