{"id":60531,"date":"2025-09-04T10:00:57","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T15:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=60531"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:09","slug":"dark-academia-grows-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/dark-academia-grows-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Academia Grows Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0Katabasis<\/em>, two graduate students at a magical version of Cambridge University go to Hell to rescue the soul of their adviser so he can give them a letter of recommendation. Anyone who has spent time in graduate school will understand the joke entailed in this premise, and also the extent to which it really isn\u2019t a joke. Possibly most <\/em>graduate students who have tried to go into the academy afterward\u2014at least during the past few decades, when the perpetual scarcity of academic jobs has fallen to catastrophic lows\u2014have understood themselves, in one way or another, to be going through Hell in order, as their prize, to get more of it.<\/p>\n

This is a novel that plays with two genres at once. On the one hand, it faithfully adheres to what readers expect of romantasy<\/em>: a genre, hugely popular with the readers of BookTok who can make a book a bestseller, that combines romance plots with fantasy settings. On the other hand, it\u2019s a satire of academia in the vein of David Lodge, Elif Batuman, or, especially, Susanna Clarke.<\/p>\n

Which places the novel in the interesting position of drawing from a specific experience but being marketed primarily to readers who haven\u2019t had that experience. The aesthetic called dark academia<\/em>\u2014which, for reasons we\u2019ll get into, is the frame through which readers on social media will likely encounter the book\u2014is one of the fastest-growing categories in publishing. The term only started appearing in deal announcements on Publishers Marketplace in 2022, but it has already accrued a long shelf of titles, including Donna Tartt\u2019s\u00a0The Secret History <\/em>(retroactively), Leigh Bardugo\u2019s\u00a0Ninth House<\/em>, M. L. Rio\u2019s If We Were Villains<\/em>, and Kuang\u2019s own\u00a0Babel<\/em>. It also pervades TikTok, Tumblr, and Instagram hashtags. Think Gothic corridors, gloomy libraries, deadly secret societies, marble busts of authors watching you with knowing eyes.<\/p>\n

Generally, the dark<\/em> in dark academia refers to safely improbable things, like murder. Some people theorize that the appetite for dark academia started with the Harry Potter books, which gave young readers a taste for old stone dormitories, magical books, and late-night study sessions in the library\u2019s Restricted Section. Regardless of whether that\u2019s true, it is<\/em> true that dark academia tends to present a vision of academic life that has far more to do with fantasy than reality. Dark academia is magical, murderous, melodramatic. It tends to be interested in Gothic questions, like whether we can bury a sin for good. The characters don\u2019t care about the particularities of the academic job market. They\u2019re more interested in questions like who murdered their classmate and whether the evidence points to a poisoned book or the necromantic rituals of a secret society.<\/p>\n

But Kuang uses the confluence of these elements\u2014romantasy, academic satire, and dark academia\u2014to pose a more interesting set of questions. To wit: What is<\/em> the magic that scholars find in the academy? (Kuang holds degrees from Georgetown, Cambridge, and Oxford, and is currently taking a PhD at Yale.) What are the wrongs they\u2019re asked to quietly endure\u2014the things that make academia, so to speak, dark?<\/em> And is the magic worth the darkness? Her novel has the obligatory murders, but there\u2019s an allegorical resonance that comes from its setting in an academic world that graduate students and professors would recognize.<\/p>\n

For instance, the adviser the protagonists seek is a celebrity scholar who enjoys seeing his advisees suffer, plays them against each other, and likes to remind them that without him, their careers are nothing. (We\u2019ve all met the type.) Kuang\u2019s magical Cambridge includes impoverished graduate students, professors who place their own names on papers their students wrote, sabotage, snobbery, sexual harassment, and bureaucratic machinery that readily crushes whoever gets in its way. Magic is, in fact, just another academic discipline there, like philosophy or literature; and, as in those disciplines, graduate students are so desperate to get one of the few tenure-track jobs that they\u2019re willing to walk through fire. The protagonist, Alice Law, reflects on her situation in words that would fit in any of those unhappy essays that former tenure-track hopefuls write when they leave the academy: \u201cShe had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.\u201d
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

If the devotion scholars feel toward their work is intense and sometimes irrational, it\u2019s because this is one of the last spaces of unalienated labor. It\u2019s precisely because the work is so powerful that younger scholars are willing to put up with bad actors for the chance to keep doing it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

The magic system is based on how academia works.\u00a0Magicians work with the hermeneutics of interpreting statements and philosophical problems; if the interpretation can be jinked in such a way that the impossible seems possible\u2014even for a moment\u2014then the impossible will happen. (It\u2019s the old author\u2019s boast: fiction is magic.) Their methods of doing this split them into factions as quarrelsome as the panels at an MLA convention: \u201cOver in America, visual illusions and flashy showmanship were all the rage. In Europe they were going on about things called postmodernist and poststructuralist magick, which seemed to involve lots of spells doing the opposite of what their inventors wanted, and spells that did nothing at all, which everyone claimed was very profound.\u201d<\/p>\n

That someone can only be a magician if they work in academia may seem odd, given all that magic has the potential to do. But that\u2019s how it is in our world, too. Literature professors, for instance, think of what they teach as sublimely important, but most literature majors wind up in a corporate world that can find no better use for their talents than improving a brand\u2019s SEO strategy.1<\/a><\/sup> Some magical-PhD holders stay in the conversation, so to speak, by becoming hedge witches, but it\u2019s the same lonely office as being an independent scholar.<\/p>\n

And yet the magic, in the novel\u2019s world as well as our own, is very real. Because of the nature of the magic system, every time the characters use magic, they experience it as if they were making a surprising connection or devising an elegant argument. And \u201cthe profession\u201d\u2014as people in academia call it, as if to suggest there is no other profession\u2014has other enchantments, besides: the moral groundedness of doing work that might matter; the satisfaction of a really good teaching day; what historians call \u201cthe pleasures of the archive.\u201d If the devotion scholars feel toward their work is intense and sometimes irrational, it\u2019s because this is one of the last spaces of unalienated labor. It\u2019s precisely because the work is so powerful, in fact, that younger scholars are willing to put up with bad actors for the chance to keep doing it.<\/p>\n

The magic is also in the references. In the world of Katabasis<\/em>, all the great stories about journeys to Hell, from Orpheus to Dante to T. S. Eliot, are nonfiction accounts that can serve as Baedeker guides for living travelers daring the same descent. Characters talk about literature and mythology constantly, which makes sense, given that any work of fiction in our world might be nonfiction in that one. And allusions wink at us above the level of the plot: the protagonists\u2019 names are Alice, suggestive of the girl who fell into Wonderland, and Peter, suggestive of the original lost boy.<\/p>\n

In short, the novel treats literature as a lived-in place\u2014as it feels when you\u2019re young enough to believe all the stories, or old enough to believe them again. (I won\u2019t tell you how the book ends, but if you\u2019ve read Paradise Lost<\/em> or Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>, you know the words<\/em> it ends with.)<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Essays<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Four Ways to Ruin Dante\u2014and One to Save Him<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Justin <\/a>\n \n Justin Steinberg <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

As a satire, the novel covers plenty of academic absurdities and offenses, which readers might interpret, variously, as peccadilloes or contrapassi<\/em> or minor infernal torments. In the \u201cPride\u201d circle of Hell, for instance, a dean lists some of the sins that brought souls to that lesser ring: a reviewer who turned down manuscripts that didn\u2019t cite him; a scholar who claimed to work at Oxford, when it was really Oxford Brookes; a medievalist who \u201cmade his wife call him Doctor<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I assume the novel was written with the expectation that academics, taking the bait to treat it as a roman \u00e0 clef, would amplify the conversation by quibbling over such details, which I\u2019ll do here: I\u2019m convinced that, in real life, the sin the professor would commit against his wife wouldn\u2019t be having her call him Doctor<\/em>, but having her work on his dissertation without giving her credit.2<\/a><\/sup> The other sins I\u2019ve seen. And others still: visiting fellows from outside academia who quickly update their bios to say they \u201cteach at Prestigious University\u201d and never update them again; archivists who growl and snap at the gates like Cerberus; undergraduates who campaign to change their grades with all the calm and wisdom of a pro se litigant.<\/p>\n

If that were all one had to endure, the joke of the novel\u2019s basic conceit wouldn\u2019t land with nearly as much impact. But we all know how the soft snow of silence in this business covers over real exploitation, real abuses of power. A few pages in, there\u2019s a piece of withheld information that made me think the adviser had committed what Americans call a Title IX violation. You\u2019ll have to read the book to see if I was right.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

And yet\u2014Kuang very obviously loves this place, too. Like Milton, who can\u2019t look at Eve in Paradise Lost<\/em> without falling in love with her, Kuang can\u2019t look at Cambridge without being in love with it. Or maybe a better comparison is the moment in the Iliad<\/em> when the Trojan council of elders, who have seen their city ground down under a nearly decade-long war for the sake of Helen, see her approaching the city\u2019s walls and say to each other, effectively, \u201cI get it.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

When the protagonists first get a good look at Hell, for example, they discover that it has bent to the shape of their own \u201cmoral universe,\u201d just as the Hell of Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> reflects the moral universe of 13th-century Florence. But whereas Dante saw stinking swamps and bleeding trees, reflecting his idea that suffering in Hell is just the sin itself without the illusion that made it desirable, Kuang can\u2019t help but look with desire, even here:<\/p>\n

So perhaps they should have expected, then, for Hell to take on a most familiar landscape: Gothic towers, courtyard walls, and winding between them, a single paved path\u2014just wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists, not wide enough for cars. You always knew, stepping into such places, what they were for. You knew precisely where you were from the uniformity of design; the same shades of brick and stone across buildings. You knew from the lack of wide streets and shop signs; from the quiet absence of children. You knew from the arched gates that marked the boundary. Fairy gates, signaling departure. The mundane world ended here. These were not places of leisure or business. These were places to be still, to think, and to step out of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cChrist,\u201d said Peter. \u201cHell is a campus.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Essays<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n How the Campus Becomes the Border<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n Daniel Gonzalez <\/a>, et al.\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

As I mentioned, the challenge that the author has set herself is to combine a satire of a very specific world with a genre novel for a much larger readership. It\u2019s also a younger<\/em> readership than the one David Lodge, for instance, wrote for, and therefore less likely to be familiar with the academic labor system.5<\/a><\/sup> In Lodge\u2019s time, genre fiction was written to be bought in airports or at the grocery store checkout. In the 21st century, it has undergone a consumer revolution, thanks to the rise of reading communities, mostly women in Gen Z, who talk about books on social media\u2014the younger sisters of the readers Janice Radway discusses in her 1984 classic, Reading the Romance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

These communities are powerful\u2014so much so that they\u2019ve changed the very way books are made. Now book covers are designed to stand out on a phone screen, not just in the hands.6<\/a><\/sup> Bookstores are putting out tables showcasing story categories that Gen Z is intimately familiar with, but that haven\u2019t yet made it to the labels on the regular shelves: romantasy<\/em>, cozy fantasy<\/em>, dystopian romance<\/em>, dark academia<\/em>. In 2021, Shannon DeVito, a senior director at Barnes & Noble, told the New York Times<\/em> that success on BookTok can mean \u201ccrazy sales\u2014I mean tens of thousands of copies a month.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Genre is a suite of expectations on the part of readers.8<\/a><\/sup> Accordingly, this book indulges the reader with a charcuterie of BookTok bait. By page five, we\u2019ve squarely hit the trope \u201cenemies to lovers.\u201d After that, we soon hit \u201clook at me\u201d (a trope in which one character says these words to another having a panic attack), \u201conly one bed,\u201d and \u201cfake dating.\u201d Then we get \u201clook at me\u201d again, this time reversing the speaker and the listener.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the book\u2019s presentation and marketing aim, in part, for that BookTok audience. Influencers are on the media list to receive galleys. The launch campaign will include a \u201cdeluxe limited hardcover\u201d with illustrated fore edges\u2014which is going to look great on Instagram and TikTok, where content creators will hold up the book for the camera and recite the story\u2019s tropes. (These also include \u201cslow burn,\u201d \u201csecond-chance romance,\u201d and \u201che falls first.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Kuang is doing well: she\u2019s a New York Times<\/em> best-selling author, and already, at 29, the kind of high-profile author whose name appears in book-deal listings as a selling point\u2014\u201cPitched for fans of R. F. Kuang.\u201d The galley of Katabasis<\/em> was as hard to get as a Sally Rooney galley.<\/p>\n

Will her Gen Z readers be interested in the question of whether the magic of academia is worth it? If she\u2019s done the job that a novelist is supposed to do, they will. She may even inspire some of them to go to grad school\u2014an offense for which, if there is justice in the afterlife, she will certainly have to put in some time in Purgatory.<\/a><\/p>\n

  1. Wartime is an exception when the outside world acknowledges the value of those ivory-tower disciplines; just as Bletchley Park and the OSS recruited humanities scholars, university magicians, when war breaks out, use their skills in the nation\u2019s service. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. Because I often write about the history of universities, I read a lot of old dissertations, and by now I\u2019m a connoisseur of the roundabout ways men used to thank their wives in the acknowledgments for doing research without saying it outright. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. Of course I was right. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  4. When they saw Helen coming there, their words<\/p>\n

    flew forth. The old men said to one another,<\/p>\n

    \u201cThe Trojans and the Greeks in their fine armor<\/p>\n

    should not be blamed for suffering so long<\/p>\n

    for such a woman, being as she is.<\/p>\n

    It is uncanny how she seems to look<\/p>\n

    like the immortal goddesses. But still,<\/p>\n

    though she is like this, let her sail away,<\/p>\n

    or she may bring about catastrophe<\/p>\n

    for us and for our children in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

    So spoke the old men.<\/p>\n

    Homer, Iliad<\/em>, translated from the Greek by Emily Wilson (Norton, 2023), 3.189-198. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>

  5. On the history of campus novels (about undergraduates) and academic novels (about professors), see, for example, Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents<\/em> (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), and Jeffrey Williams, \u201cThe Rise of the Academic Novel,\u201d American Literary History<\/em>, vol. 24, no. 3 (2012). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  6. \u201cHow BookTok Is Redefining Reading among Gen Z\u2014And Book Design along with It<\/a>,\u201d Design & Paper<\/em>, May 30, 2025. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  7. Elizabeth Harris, \u201cHow Crying on TikTok Sells Books<\/a>,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, March 20, 2021. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  8. This definition, which I think is very good, is from Matt Bird, The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers<\/em> (Writer\u2019s Digest, 2016), p. 244. \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    R. F. Kuang uses the confluence of romantasy, academic satire, and dark academia to pose a more interesting set of questions. To wit: What is the magic that scholars find in the academy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":60569,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[280,1437,511,70,17,2465,422,150,2181,952],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1144],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-60531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-academia","tag-classics","tag-death","tag-fantasy","tag-fiction","tag-harper-voyager","tag-higher-education","tag-novel","tag-tiktok","tag-university","section-print-screen"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDark Academia Grows Up - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"R. F. 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