defining the dark academia novel

notes towards a dark academia canon in four parts

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Like so many of my internet brethren, I have a long relationship with dark academia. I read a copy of The Secret History from my school library when I was maybe fourteen, and it took hold of me breathlessly and entirely. I felt like I wasn’t a person anymore while I was reading it, because I’d vanished so completely into Hampden. There wasn’t such a thing as ‘dark academia’ as a label then. The Secret History was just a really good book I liked. On tumblr in 2020, when I had no regular work and it was illegal to go outside, I heard the phrase ‘dark academia’ for the first time.

The label did something I’m always interested in - it bound a disparate community of books that mostly already existed into a new canon based on new rules. A lot of books that had never realised they were dark academia suddenly had a new name for themselves. Moodboards and text posts of recommendation pulled themes and motifs together that hadn’t been together before.

As a researcher and a reader, I’m obsessed with new genres. I’ve got another set of posts I’m researching alongside this one about romantasy, where it came from and what it is (if it’s anything). I love the birth of a new genre and the odd dreamworld proto-genre time when readers and critics have a feel for what a genre might be but aren’t sure yet. It’s coolest before the publishers have caught up to what’s happening, before book covers with dark academia starter kit clip art are being churned out to cash in on a trend, though we’re a good way past that event horizon now.

There’s a small amount of academic research on what made the hallmarks of dark academia appeal to people in 2020 specifically. An excellent paper is Simone Murray’s ‘Dark Academia: Bookishness, Readerly Self-fashioning and the Digital Afterlife of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History’, published in 2023. Murray argues that while the urge to romanticise beautiful ivory tower academic institutions has always existed, the switch to online education for so many young people during the Covid-19 pandemic caused an escapist desire for ‘digital denialism’. You might prefer not to be on zoom completing a shoddily digitised curriculum in your pyjamas, because in your dream life you’re wearing an enigmatic frock coat in a snowy wood, living through something inflected by Ovid while reciting Ovid and handwriting long essays about Ovid.

I like that argument for escapism and it definitely applies to me. During 2020, my attempts to save up for a full time masters degree sputtered and died, I lost my job and I consumed a lot of horror and true crime in my childhood bedroom. The moodboards appealed to the part of me that was reaching out for something I couldn’t have.

Now it’s been (somehow) five years since 2020 and dark academia has gone from a series of Secret History moodboards to a real genre - maybe. I had the idea for this piece when I was doing some pre-research for a more academic paper on retellings of Dante and their reception on the internet. I realised the number of books labelled as ‘dark academia’ had ballooned. There were both new books being written as ‘dark academia novels’, probably by people consuming the same moodboards as me in 2020, and there were novels suddenly receiving the Donna Tartt treatment, suddenly finding they were dark academia decades or centuries after publication.

In this post, I want to talk a bit about my efforts to understand what makes something ‘a dark academia book’ and how far it’s a genre at all. I reckon it is a genre, insofar as I think it’s a useful label to use when talking about a clear pool of books. That pool has slightly fuzzy edges, for sure, as do all genres. Me saying I think it is a genre doesn’t mean I think it has perfectly defined edges or will last forever, but I think the sentence ‘that’s a dark academia novel’ has meaning. That’s enough to make it a genre to me.

So I’m going to talk a bit about what I think ‘dark academia’ means and what I view as its four subcategories. I’ll talk about a bunch of examples from each category, though I’ve not read every book that could possibly be counted as dark academia. I’m also not going to weigh into whether each book is good, or whether dark academia itself is good. I certainly have opinions, and I’m thinking of writing a second post with all the ‘is this book good?’ content that I didn’t think would be helpful in this one.

My personal star rating for a book also doesn’t make a difference to whether a genre is real or not. Some of the books I’ve read for this piece that I enjoyed the least taught me the most - because considering a scrappy piece of art with all the construction lines still visible teaches you a lot about how people draw.

I’ll start with answering two somewhat pedantic questions, though I think they’re too important to skip over. What is ‘dark’ and what is ‘academia’? Then I’ll talk about the four subcategories of the genre that I think exist and flow into each other.

What is ‘dark’ and what is ‘academia’?

There are no prizes available for saying that in order for a book to be a dark academia novel, it must be dark and academic. I think there are a few different ways we can be each thing, and a true dark academia book will do at least a few from each list.

So, dark:

• Dark as an aesthetic. Candlelight, stars in the sky, gloomy rooms, dark clothes, dark furniture, sneaking about at night time, clouds covering the moon. These books build on gothic motifs and bringing them together into a genre sprouted out of moodboards and visual ‘aesthetic’ posts. So these visual bits of literal darkness matter a lot. You’re not dark academia if you’re prancing through a midsummer meadow in a white sundress and giggling, no matter how many murders you do.

• The dark side of human nature. A lot of these books have murder in, or cheating, or creepy sex things. Mainly murder. Academics do dark things. Bunny is dead.

• The dark side of ivory tower academic institutions. This has a lot in common with ‘the dark side of human nature’ but is somewhat different. You can do a murder without interrogating the power structures that keep poor people out of elite universities. You can do social-justice-motivated questioning of power structures without killing anyone.

A lot of books gesture vaguely at ‘only rich people to go this university’ but don’t get too deep into that, and mainly we’re here for the murder and candlelight. I think a ‘true’ dark academia book will have a solid amount of all three, but you can do a little of column A and a little of column B. One of my favourite short stories in In These Hallowed Halls, a dark academia short story collection that I found very useful researching this piece, is ‘The Hare and the Hound’ by Kelly Andrew. Injuring a rabbit who may or may not shapeshift into a woman who may or may not seek her terrible revenge on you via dreadful Norse mythology powers isn’t, really, a societal issue. But it’s creepy, and if you do it at an elite college and there’s lots of floundering around in libraries reading old epics then I think it counts. The editors of a dark academia short story collection certainly thought it counted.

I’ve seen many people on social media say that point three, the dark side of ivory tower academic institutions, is the entire core and point of dark academia, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’ve seen people say the point of The Secret History is to realise everyone in the Greek class is pathetic and useless and Richard is a moron for idolising them. I think the interplay of romanticism and darkness is the key thing here - you have to juggle how you love the beautiful parts of it and the sickening things you’ve realised simultaneously. I don’t think either one really wins. I reread The Secret History or Babel and experience the rise and fall of ‘I really want to sit in that library, and I have big ethical concerns, but I really want to sit in the library, but I still have big ethical concerns’. I think you need both for it to be a story worth meditating on and mulling over. Surely that’s what all dark academia is at least aiming to be, asking questions for long-term grappling not short term saying, ‘yep, they’re morons’ or ‘yep, they’re very sexy’.

And academia:

• Straightforwardly, academia as a setting. When you picture the world of the book you’re picturing academia, and it’s pretty much got to be an institution. Probably an imaginary institution, or a heavily fictionalised one like the fantastical Oxford of Babel or Yale of Ninth House. It could be a school or a university depending on the age of the protagonists. I’m really intrigued by the idea of a dark academia story set literally anywhere else, or in the academia of independent scholars who never get to be romanticised in moodboards. I’d also be up for it in a botanical garden, a barrister’s chambers, or an antiquarian bookshop but in practice we’re talking schools and colleges. The only potential exception I can think of here is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I’d place with one foot in the door of the dark academia canon.

• More deeply, we want to see academic content as an inseparable part of the plot. The dark academia ur-text, The Secret History, does not just tell us about some classics students who did murder in their free time, it tells us about being driven to murder by frantic devotion to bridging the gap between the classical age and their own experience. The content of their degree subject births the murder. In the same way, If We Were Villains sees murder rise out of Shakespeare.

In most cases, dark academia novels show us students, either school students or undergraduates, driven towards something dark, wild and interesting by their course content. As well as being set against an academic backdrop we also see that the most important relationship in these books is that between the characters and what they are learning.

A truly dark academia book, I think, is one where the main character’s most significant relationship is with scholarship more than any human characters. Robin Swift in Babel has complicated relationships with Ramy, and his father, and his brother, but his relationship with translation is the driving force and core of everything. There’s a version of the book without his brother but not without translation. You could take the love story out of Possession or its Welsh-inflected YA child A Study in Drowning, but you couldn’t take the poetic intrigue out.

There are some books that are published and consumed as dark academia which use the academia more as a setting. I’ve seen a lot of conversation about The Atlas Six that say it works harder at being set in a library than discussing the contents of the books in the library, and I reckon that’s true. Across the ‘dark academia canon’ as a whole, I think that people’s relationships with scholarly content is more important and motivating than having an educational institution as the setting. But equally, we can’t ignore that this is a genre born out of moodboards, so having it as a setting does matter.

One more point before we move on from academia. As an optional extra on top of the engagement with scholarly content, a lot of dark academia books go beyond the course content to make the structure and workings of the institutions part of their ivory tower mythology. Think about Ninth House’s elaborate magic/management structures - the book cares as much about how a university is put together from architecture to staffing as it does about training and learning.

There are a lot of different ways you can examine a university. I think some of the most interesting ones are the ones that come in sideways. A couple of interesting books to mention here are Night Shift by M.L. Rio (of If We Were Villains fame) and the short story ‘The Professor of Ontography’ by Helen Grant from the In These Hallowed Halls collection.

Night Shift explicitly examines the perspectives of outsiders and semi-outsiders on university work. These are taxi drivers, bartenders and students with full time jobs keeping them out all night in uniform while everyone else is studying and having a classically ‘dark academia’ experience. That’s something I find interesting and appealing as a part time student who spends more time in an office than I do in glamorous ancient libraries. When the story cycles back towards ‘scholarly content’ towards its end, we bring in the experience of these minimum wage shift workers as a grubby but essential part of how a university is run.

‘The Professor of Ontography’ is set in a more ‘traditional’ gorgeous Oxford college, but it centres a mystery around what and where an academic department is, so much that no one can work out who studies or teaches there. Its main characters might be a classicist and an engineer, but they do no classics or engineering at all, because they stare at doors in hallways that could lead to working out what ontography is. This builds into a fascinating M.R. James-esque old school horror story. What’s most interesting here is the complete lack of focus on what Phoebe is actually studying - the only references to classics come when she’s halfheartedly reading to distract herself from the ontography mystery. It’s explicitly a story about not studying because unravelling the teaching structure of your college is more interesting.

How far dark academia books are also campus novels, or whether they are only campus novels, is an interesting question. When I saw M.L. Rio speak about If We Were Villains and Night Shift in London last year, she spoke a lot about how people keep telling her she wrote a dark academia novel, maybe even a defining dark academia novel, when she had no idea what that label was. She thought she was writing a campus novel. I wrote about that discussion in detail the day after the event in my piece ‘the dream life and the dark academia life’ (read it, it’s good). I think probably all dark academia novels are campus novels but not all campus novels are dark academia novels. There’s a certain amount of literal darkness that Lucky Jim or The Rachel Papers can’t manage (though there’s a lot of darkness in misogyny, hmm).

So academia is many things and dark is many things. But I think the menu of definitions I talk about above is a scale that encompasses the full dark academia ‘canon’ insofar as one exists.

But what is that canon?

One dark academia or four dark academias?

I think there are four subtypes of dark academia book. You can be a hybrid of two or three of them, but across these four types I think all ‘dark academia novels’ are included. I’ll call them:

1. Core dark academia

2. Pre-dark academia

3. Speculative dark academia

4. YA dark academia

I don’t think we’ve got space here to provide a full booklist for each one, though I do have one I can post if anyone is interested. To put the list together, I typed ‘dark academia books’ into TikTok then I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled. I tallied up how many times each book was mentioned and came up with a good hundred books or so, in addition to the generous handful I’ve read in the last five years as an amateur enthusiast. I’ve not read all of them but I hope I’ve read a representative sample, or enough of a representative sample to be useful. Maybe. I hope.

Core dark academia

I originally wanted to call this ‘true dark academia’ or just ‘dark academia’ but I didn’t like the idea of making the other types seem less-than. This is the most obvious, basic, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin type, the one that aligns most with those original tumblr moodboards.

So this is a book aimed at adults, probably about students at university age or older, that’s generally literary fiction and not any subset of genre fiction. In this bucket we’ll put some dark academia big dogs (The Secret History, If We Were Villains, Bunny) and then there’s a deep hinterland here of books people talk about less, like The Latinist or Mrs S.

There are a couple of exceptions to these rules, mainly books for adult readers about school-age characters. There’s always more of those than I think, including books like Prep and The Virgins that I would say are at least half dark academia. They score a few points at least on the framework I outlined above, though they’re probably more on the campus novel side than intending to be dark academia. But then, intending to be dark academia is a very recent development all round.

We’ll count The Secret History as core dark academia because it is, itself, the core of dark academia. My personal belief is that a core dark academia book has to have been published after The Secret History and it will most likely have been published post If We Were Villains, post tumblr trend, in the mid-2010s or later.

Pre-dark academia

There’s a tension I find really interesting in the dark academia community between the desire to read books that talk about dark academia topics and the desire to read the kind of books that the characters in a dark academia novel would be reading. When I scrolled for a long (long) time through book recommendations tagged this way in TikTok, a huge number of the books referenced had very little visible relevance to dark academia at all.

These books were old, usually weighty, almost exclusively by white canonical authors, and the kind of thing you’d find in a ‘classics’ section of a library. (I don’t really like the designation ‘classics’ - it just seems to mean old book liked by enough people to still be in print, but that’s a subject for another essay.)

Some have gothic elements (Dracula, Frankenstein), some are set at least partly at university (Maurice) and some ask dark questions involving art and thought (The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is the most mentioned of this category by far). In general, though, I think these books are ‘dark academia’ not because they fit the genre constraints but because when you read them you feel like the protagonist of a dark academia novel. Having these books on your shelf makes you a dark academia kind of person.

The idea that The Iliad and Odyssey come up a lot in these posts seems odd until you remember Henry Winter, god-king of the aesthetes, was a Homer specialist. You’re a lot more like Henry Winter when you have a hot new Emily Wilson translation on your bedside table than if you read a YA novel. That is one of the central tensions of dark academia reading, I think. You can read about Henry Winter or you can be Henry Winter but in most cases it’s hard to do both. I think a healthy diet involves a good amount of both and I’m not at all arguing reading YA, or reading YA as an adult, is bad. I’m literally reading a children’s fantasy novel in my breaks from writing this (Sabriel, read it, it’s good). But I do think these pre-dark academia books perform an important role in the dark academia community. They’re how you make the aesthetic real.

I know I’m not meant to be offering value judgements here but in general I think that’s fantastic. I am all for the teens (and post-teens) romanticizing school and wanting to read fat old books. I love fat old books. Being curious and a little pretentious about them as a teenager is what led me to my literature PhD. However, I also think this pre dark academia category is where it becomes unavoidable to have a conversation about racism and exclusion in social media constructions of new literary canons.

These kinds of books posed in luscious, aesthetic piles and filmed in candlelight are where I see good grounds for the allegation that dark academia is racist. In the more recently produced books I’ve seen a good amount of willingness to interrogate the racist and colonial power structures that give us the academy as we know it, and that’s increasing more and more with time, which is awesome. The teetering piles of old classics in their beautiful bindings with the gold foil are always really white though. It says something about the kind of school we’re valorizing when we do that.

Because the pre dark academia canon is created by curation rather than writing new books, there’s not really much excuse for not curating that better. The Iliad has been recited by generations of aspirational hardworking students in elite academies but so has Confucius’ Analects. The Aeneid is an extended mythologized poem narrating the birth of an empire but so is Sunjata. I’d back the argument that while Ovid, Shakespeare and my own beloved medieval period are really cool, you’re being a more ambitious, wide reaching dark academia queen if you go deep into the birth of the Mali Empire than Rome. If the defining feature of a dark academia protagonist is an infinite and unquenchable thirst for understanding then we can set our sights wider, get more and different classics on those ‘booktok recommends’ tables in bookshops, and dream bigger.

Speculative dark academia

Mainly I mean fantasy here. Dark academia meets fantasy as a natural kind of bedfellow, where they bleed together through the gothic. Babel is one of the main and central dark academia books and its use of magic allows it to ask the same questions as a lot of the core dark academia books, but to give less literal answers. In the same way they can push the statements they make about the academy stranger and wilder, they can also push the aesthetic stranger and wilder.

In many cases, dark academia fantasy is luscious and more picturesque than core dark academia (and those books were already pretty luscious and picturesque). This is not a grimdark genre, it’s a beautiful one. Where there’s horror and corruption waiting behind a veil, the veil is very lovely. A book like Juniper and Thorn can make its entire world into an extravagantly carved intricate puzzle box.

I used the word ‘speculative’ rather than ‘fantasy’ here because I wanted to allow for the possibility of it not being just fantasy. There’s no reason dark academia science fiction doesn’t or shouldn’t exist. I’ve not read every dark academia book in existence, though I’ve certainly done my best, and there are really not a lot of examples of sci fi. The closest examples I can think of are Catherine House and Neverworld Wake, which I would say are more sci fi than fantasy, but very soft in their scientificness and not books to read if you want starships or clear answers to worldbuilding questions.

Perhaps science fiction being, in general, future-minded makes it incompatible with a genre that exists to interrogate the past. If sci fi is often large scale and shiny, dark academia is introspective and tarnished. Though there’s a long tradition of dark and moody inward-looking sci fi (Solaris) and even sci fi that uses other planets to interrogate medieval history (Dune, A Canticle for Leibowitz). So if a sci fi dark academia wanted to exist, it could. Perhaps none of the people reblogging those dark academia photosets in 2018 were trekkies. Maybe I’m going to get recommended a pile of sci fi dark academia books in the comments of this post or in aggressive DMs (please please please). Or there might be someone honing a manuscript right now wondering if anyone wants to read that. I do. I want to read that. Please give me dark academia with time travel and aliens.

YA dark academia

I’m not certain how much I have to say about this one, which is why I somewhat weakly left it to last. I think the reason there’s less to say about it is that, while the ages of protagonists and amount of explicit sexual or violence material might be different, it carefully and deliberately asks the same questions as books aimed at adults and uses many of the same design and plot ideas.

This is a genre that presents aspirational institutions and then questions them, takes the content of education and brings it gorgeously and monstrously to life. Being centred on schooling means the adult portion of the genre comes closer to children’s and teens’ literature than some other genres. Most dark academia novels resist closure and prefer open-ended conclusions. We ask questions that aren’t answered. So whether a student has been at school or at university, we probably end up in the same place, having deconstructed or been horrified by similar things, and then looking out towards an uncertain future. They can be speculative or real life and there are probably as many examples of fantasy YA dark academia as real-life ones.

It makes sense to me that a genre invented by (largely) young social media users reading fat books for grownups from the 90s or before would collapse ‘teen’ and ‘grownup’ categories together. One of the most popular of the YA novels that comes up when you search is A Study in Drowning, and its plot is very similar to A.S. Byatt’s ‘grownup’ classic Possession (which just edged into pre dark academia, having been published in 1990, and has a lot of interesting comparison points with The Secret History). That’s not an allegation of plagiarism at all - both books start with a premise many people could come up with and ask the questions that spin off from that, in different cultural contexts, with or without magic. I love both books but I think it’s very interesting how one is pretty rich in YA hallmarks and one is very definitely for grownups but by considering the same questions they take you to the same destination.

Perhaps I’ve talked myself into arguing YA dark academia isn’t a real category here. I still think it bears splitting out separately, though, because being YA or not is a label that matters to people. There are people who passionately only read YA, or never read YA, or in the case of one friend of mine, religiously read YA in January of every year. The age of the protagonists, prose style and amount of explicit material matters and letting it matter means we have to let it be its own sub-genre. So there it is. YA.

What have we learned from this?

I really hope we’ve learned something from this. It took me hours.

I started researching this because I wanted to answer the question of whether dark academia was a real genre. I think I determined that it was, insofar as I reckon a genre is a category of books that it’s meaningful to have a recognised term for, a body of books we might want to talk about for literary criticism reasons. I think this is as cohesive a canon of books as ‘romance novels’ or ‘westerns’. So yes, I think it’s a genre. Small, internet-derived, popular with women and teens, but those things don’t make a genre bad or fake, they just make it struggle to get widespread respectful coverage.

The more meaningful question to me, I think, is what we go on to say about dark academia. If I’m defining a good genre label as a useful term we’d want to use when discussing the books, the natural follow up question is: what conversations do we want to have? There’s a lot to be said here about how we view, love, romanticize and aspire towards education in an era when university funding is more and more painful and the dream of universal access could be fading away. Dark academia adores the humanities - not just the humanities, the most unemployable humanities. It loves classics and literary theory for all the reasons our governments don’t want to see. There’s a lot of interesting things to say there.

The role of race and the empire in dark academia has been discussed a good bit but the conversation isn’t done. The structure of these books can provide a playground for examining cultures meeting, making friends, clashing, and eating each other. If dark academia is a genre where people look back and form personal, comforting, beautiful, horrifying, poignant relationships with the past, then what do those relationships look like for people of different bodies, backgrounds, sexualities, genders, cultures?

What does it do to the actual student bodies and studies of disciplines like classics that the internet is driving interest in ways most classics professors couldn’t have predicted, or might not be aware of at all?

If we’ve said dark academia is a genre, what do we say next?