Aaron Matz

Aaron Matz teaches and writes about the English and French novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of two books: Satire in an Age of Realism, which traces the transformation of Victorian realism into the caustic mode that led to its demise; and The Novel and the Problem of New Life, an expansive study of the novel’s ambivalence toward procreation, from the nineteenth century through modernism to the present. His next book will address a predicament posed by the climate disaster: its way of forcing us into a position of irony toward the art and literature of the recent past.

His essays on literature have appeared in The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, as well as in various academic journals.

At Scripps he teaches courses on the Victorian novel, the modern British novel, the literature of the fin de siècle, realism in fiction and painting, the history of satire, modern drama, and the idea of character in fiction. He also teaches senior seminars on Hardy, Lawrence, and Woolf, and a graduate course on the Victorian novel at Claremont Graduate University.