In the New York Review of Books, Associate Professor of English Aaron Matz explores themes of domination in Émile Zola’s novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquarte. “Zola continued to describe his work as proceeding from a scientific basis,” Matz writes. “But Zola’s preeminence as the most significant French novelist of the last quarter of the nineteenth century does not rest on his scientific assurances; it endures in spite of them.”