Secret Histories and Hallowed Halls: Dark Academia, the University, and Contemporary Readership

This thesis is the first long-form study of the new literary subgenre and online culture known as “dark academia”. Beginning with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), the first chapter re-evaluates critical responses to Tartt’s work, suggesting that The Secret History is an overlooked early contribution to the genre turn of the late-twentieth century. I explore how the narrator, Richard Papen’s, fraught relationship with reality and adoration of the elite academic life is an examination of the conservative political turn of the 1990s. In chapter two, I describe and explore fan participation in the online dark academia subculture which emerged from The Secret History’s social media fanbase. I argue that the dark academia community emulates Richard Papen’s romanticisation of the university and the canon while ignoring Tartt’s critique of elitism, and I explore how M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains (2017) contributed to the adoption of “dark academia” as literary marketing term and subgenre. Chapter three explores how changing attitudes to the university are reflected in dark academia novels from the 2020s. I examine the ways in which R. F. Kuang’s Babel (2022) and other dark academia novels interrogate institutions of knowledge and the power structures they reinforce whilst simultaneously participating in the romanticisation of those institutions. Reading each of these texts in their historical contexts and tracing the development of the genre from the 1990s to the 2020s, this thesis suggests that dark academia and its accompanying subculture reveal a cultural fatigue with the inaccessibility of higher education and rising cultural anti-intellectualism. It explores how attempts at democratising academic practice have been facilitated by the emergence of the digital literary sphere, and how the production of dark academia novels accelerated from 2017 to 2022 in response to re-evaluations of the cultural capital held by traditional universities.