Saskatoon Daily Star, Saskatchewan, November 4, 1918

Ah, fine literature.

Pt.2

When Jaun Elia said Ek hi shakhs ki baat hai maula, Sara jahan kisne manga hai

“I think women like to read about murderous mothers and lost little girls because it’s our only mainstream outlet to even begin discussing female violence on a personal level. Female violence is a specific brand of ferocity. It’s invasive. A girlfight is all teeth and hair, spit and nails — a much more fearsome thing to watch than two dudes clobbering each other. And the mental violence is positively gory. Women entwine. Some of the most disturbing, sick relationships I’ve witnessed are between long-time friends, and especially mothers and daughters. Innuendo, backspin, false encouragement, punishing withdrawal, sexual jealousy, garden-variety jealousy — watching women go to work on each other is a horrific bit of pageantry that can stretch on for years. Libraries are filled with stories on generations of brutal men, trapped in a cycle of aggression. I wanted to write about the violence of women. […] I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains…I’m talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don’t tell me you don’t know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves — to the point of almost parodic encouragement — we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids.”

— Gillian Flynn, “I Was Not a Nice Little Girl”

I agree with you SO MUCH. The core value of the dark academia subculture is academics, hunger for knowledge, love for knowledge. It is disheartening to see people completely ignore that part, and focus on the 'aesthetic'. At this point it has just become a fashion trend.

I find it funny that it is widely believed that the dark academia phenomenon was born on tiktok. Maybe I’m too old now (even though I’m not) and I’m starting to think like bitter old people who observe the changes around them and stubbornly can’t accept them? I remember when dark academia reigned supreme on tumblr, when we used to read, watch, listen, take photos and share it all while getting deeper and deeper into the dark corridors. Years later, I get the strong impression that we were doing it tired of the world around us growing so fast - a reality that was slipping more and more out of our hands, that was harder and harder to keep up with. We were just kids on the internet sharing sad quotes and “aesthetic” photos on our blogs. Dark academia was some sort of universe to escape to after a hard day. Something along the lines of video games. Today, dark academia is a negation of everything it originally carried with it. Once again, tiktok has appropriated it as an online aesthetic and subculture to spend more money, to pressure others to spend more money; to make certain demands and set the bars. The moment dark academia went beyond tumblr, it automatically ceased to be this imaginary universe, created for fun, and became a capitalist game. 

I hate that I’m taking this tone, but it’s hard for me to stop myself. After all, tumblr has always been a place where you can be mad, sad, happy all you want, without the specter of being cancelled. Ok, we’re anonymous here, but most of us are also total individuals who didn’t care too much about this platform besides our own blog. So yeah, I’m disappointed that dark academia reigns supreme on tiktok, and stores are starting to have special “dark academia fashion” tabs. I guess the only positive aspect of this is that it only raises the discussion of eurocentrism and elitism in literature and filmography that is identified with dark academia. Now that it has gone out into the real world some of the items in the “dark academia syllabus” can have negative effects if approached uncritically. And we all know how critically one approaches things on tiktok….

I’ve always wanted to complain about it a little bit. Am I alone in this? Do I sound pathetic and oh god - like a boomer? I just hate tiktok SO MUCH. And I used to love dark academia, SO MUCH. 

Booklist for all the Dark Academics:

[Dark Academia book recs of all the different kinds I could think of. It's a long journey. Buckle up.]

The Classic Dark Academic :

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Anything by the Brontë sisters

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (this book birthed Dark Academia)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe

Bram Stokers Dracula

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

Maurice by EM Forster

Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Good Man is Hard to Find

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Macbeth by Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

The Poetry-lover Academic:

Poetry of Baudelaire

Odes of Keats (ALL OF THEM ARE A MUST READ)

Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (especially The Raven)

Shelley's Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Masque of Anarchy

Kubla Khan by Coleridge

T.S Elliott's Wasteland

all Emily Dickinson poetry but especially 'I felt a funeral in my brain', 'Because I could not stop for death' (read them a thousand times already)

Pablo Neruda's Nothing but Death

Langston Hughes

Tennyson's Lotos eater (underrated gem)

Sylvia Plath poems but special mentions to Lady Lazarus and the Bell jar

Paradise Lost by Milton (if you want to include something about the Devil in your list)

Poems by Sappho

The Contemporary Dark Academic:

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (the origin of Dark Academia)

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody (could recommend it a hundred times)

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

If We Were Villains by ML Rio

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Girls are all so nice here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

The Likeness by Tana French

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

One of us is lying by Karen Mcmanus

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Plot by Jean Hanff

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Conversion by Katherine Howe

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Quaint and Curious Volume

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Lying Games by Ruth Ware

Black Chalk by Christopher J Yates

The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

The Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Bad Habits by Charleigh Rose

Good Girls Lie by JT Ellison

Queer Dark Academic:

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (yes, yes, yes it's the gay shit)

Notes on a Scandal (What was she thinking?) by Zoë Heller

Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (lesbian vampire, hell yeah!)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Maurice by EM Forster

Christabel by Coleridge

Poems by Sappho

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody

The Dark Romantic Academic:

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Likeness by Tana French

The Temple House by Rachel Donohue

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Mythological Dark Academic:

(pardon me for my cluelessness)

I have not really read much about mythology but if Norse mythology is the area of your interest, Neil Gaiman is the God of it. (aka not only Good Omens and American Gods, but also the book 'Norse Mythology')

The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Circe by Madeline Miller

[Remember: Some of these books have dark academia as their major aspect but most of them have dark academia as their minor aspect, and many of them have been put into the list because I got a dark academia kind of vibe from them. Moreover these books have a lot more to offer than just Dark Academia, even if we ignore that aspect, these books are just great pieces of literature. This list is entirely created out of my own reading researches, friendly recommendations, and book recs from reddit, pinterest and the internet in general. If I have gone wrong somewhere or if you want me to add something new, feel free to drop an ask.]

“Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together? Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.”

— Emery Allen

A concept.

“creature”, half•alive // Fliegeroffizier, Karl Alexander Wilke // Vicious, V. E. Schwab

My problem is that I want to be adored like a goddess by one person and be treated as a shadow by every single soul at the same time