Current MRes Student

Dion Everett

Thesis Title:

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

Supervisor:

Dr Lola Boorman

Dr Alice Hall

Description:

Dion’s thesis explores the evolving relationship between the idea of the university, cultural capital, and genre development in the digital literary sphere. He traces the inception of the genre in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), situating Tartt’s novel as a response to developments in literary theory in the 1980s and 1990s and exploring how Tartt’s work is a key text which bridges
between “meta-genre fiction” and the “genre turn”. Then, he explores how The Secret History has become a model for the lifestyle performed by creators in the online dark academia community, focussing on the co-creative practices of readers and authors in the digital literary sphere and the development of the dark academia genre through M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains (2017). Finally, he examines the critique of the university found in R. F. Kuang’s Babel (2022) alongside an analysis of how the author-academic persona adopted by Kuang and other authors in the dark academia community reflects a desire among readers to
find pedagogical figures in their online recreation of an academic lifestyle.

Dion has just submitted his thesis. You can find a record of his work on his ORCiD profile here: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3434-2054.