65 pages • 2 hours read
Alexis HendersonAn Academy for Liars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Dark Academia
An Academy for Liars is steeped in the literary tradition of dark academia, which is a literary aesthetic and subculture that romanticizes higher education, the arts, and literature. It first appeared as a trend on the social media site Tumblr in 2015 and surged in popularity on various social media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aesthetically, dark academia evokes fashion from the 1930s and 1940s, especially clothing related to Ivy League universities, Oxford, Cambridge, and preparatory schools, like cardigans and blazers, and tweed, plaid, and houndstooth prints.
Beyond fashion, the dark academia aesthetic draws from Gothic architecture, expansive libraries, and scholarly pursuits in literature, history, languages, and antiquities. Seminal works in the dark academia aesthetic include The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, the Harry Potter series, and Babel by R.F. Kuang. Films that feature the dark academia aesthetic include Dead Poets Society and Kill Your Darlings.
Common tropes in dark academia literature include elite schools, secret societies, forbidden relationships, morally ambiguous characters, mysterious mentors, and the exploration of dark magic or knowledge. An Academy for Liars includes all these elements: Lennon joins the elite Drayton College, is inducted into the secret society in Logos House, engages in a forbidden relationship with her mysterious mentor Dante, and learns to use the dark magic of 
