Genres
Dark academia
A literary internet aesthetic and subculture concerned with higher education, the arts and literature, wrapped in a gothic, melancholic mood.
Dark academia is a literary internet aesthetic and subculture concerned with higher education, the arts and literature: an idealised vision of scholarly life built from classic literature, poetry, ancient art, Collegiate Gothic architecture, candlelight and autumn imagery, in a palette of black, beige, brown and dark green. Its mood is melancholic and mysterious, akin to the Goth subculture. Donna Tartt's 1992 novel The Secret History is credited as the trend's inspiration; the aesthetic formed on Tumblr around 2014 to 2015 and spread through Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok, surging in the early 2020s.
For novelists, dark academia is a mood before it is a plot: a cloistered campus, an obsessive circle of friends and a buried transgression, which is gothic fiction's past-intruding-on-present machinery moved into a university. Recent shelf examples include R. F. Kuang's Babel and Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House. When the campus conceals something supernatural rather than criminal, the mode slides toward dark fantasy.