You may be acquainted with the term Dark Academia and have seen the gloomy library hallways, piles of books, and tweed brown jackets that characterize it. But what is Dark Academia actually about? First coined in the mid-2010s, the term Dark Academia refers to an aesthetic that relies on various aspects: literature, art, and fashion. These aspects make Dark Academia a subgenre within literature and a subculture within social media. Its literature is characteristic for its Gothicism and Romanticism of academic settings, that is, university campuses. Here is a guide on the genre and some recommendations.
The idealization of a higher education plays a vital role in the subgenre. With it, comes a sense of elitism known to pervade these settings. It works as a playground for the character’s own ambition and sense of entitlement.
Although Dark Academia is perceived as an aesthetic through its fashion and art, as these are obviously visual mediums, the backbone of Dark Academia is its literature. There are lists upon lists that number countless novels that fit the category. Typically, these texts will have three main criteria; university setting, unsettling events, and murder.
Where should you start if you’d like to get into this subgenre? If you want to start with the work that started it all, you would have to grab Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. This work of fiction, heavily inspired on Tartt’s own experience in an isolated Vermont College, is one of the firsts, if not the first, that gained the description of Dark Academia. The cult classic submerges you into the life of a group of Classics students that, under mysterious circumstances, end up murdering one of their own.
It is described as “part thriller, part coming-of-age campus novel and part Greek tragedy”. Tartt captures a tale that lures the reader in, because, in addition to her Dickensian method of novel writing, she narrates everything that will happen in her novel in the first sentence. It is so well done that instead of disinteresting the readers, it engages them. It is definitely a novel worth the hype and, when finished reading, one you wish you could read all over again for the first time. Here is that memorable first line:
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation”
Nevertheless, if you do not want the commitment of reading more than 600 pages in the middle of this fall semester, M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains is a similar tale with similar themes. Replace classics with Shakespeare studies, and you have another tale of murder and morality. This book is half the commitment than that of The Secret History, with 300 pages or so, but still manages to capture a similar tone, aesthetic and themes.
The novel follows Oliver Marks, a former student of Dellecher Classical Conservatory, ten years into a prison sentence. Through it, he narrates the events that led to his prison sentence. Love, betrayal, jealousy, and guilt all loom over the tale. Rio uses the same structure of a Shakespearean play, 5 acts, directly parallel to Julius Caesar at its crucial moments.
Although The Secret History is a 90s child and has been proclaimed the one that started the dark academia subgenre, you can still find older works of literature with the characteristics necessary to be deemed dark academia. Therefore, if you tend to gravitate towards classic literature I recommend you grab Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s Victorian novel, at less than 300 pages, explores morality to the fullest. It is the tale of Dorian, a young, affluent adult, whose image is captured in a portrait. Simply put, the portrait Dorian switches places with real life Dorian. As he gets older, only the painting shows him aging as he stays young forever. The central themes of dark academia as a genre are present here, which makes it one of those classics that have stood the test of time while, at the same time, leaving significant descendance and influence.
There is a lot more to Dark Academia as it is intersectional and recently defined. Yet I hope that with these basics if you ever felt intimidated by such a genre, you feel more comfortable in reaching for a novel with these topics. Dark Academia, I recommend, can be best enjoyed this fall season as its topics tend to lean into the dark and gloomy.