disanthropy

plural disanthropies

1. uncountableusuallyliterary criticismA misanthropic desire for a world without human life, expressed in literature.First known use 2012

   Disanthropy constitutes a formal challenge, as most literary and artistic forms and genres imply a human voice, character, or perspective, which complicates the representation of (often far future) worlds without us.

   2020, Pieter Vermeulen, “Glossary”, in Literature and the Anthropocene, Abingdon, Oxfordshire; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 174

   2 more examples

   [pages 40–41] D. H. Lawrence, enthused and infuriated by [Friedrich] Nietzsche, entrusted to his alter ego Birkin in Women in Love a desire that I will call "disanthropy": […] Lawrence may have yearned for a world without people, but it was Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse that first explored disanthropy as a formal problem. […] [page 44] Alongside the varied disanthropies of Michael Snow, Werner Herzog, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, however, other possibilities of formal (usually partial or strictly provisional) impersonality emerge: […]

   2012, Greg Garrard, “Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy”, in Ranjan Ghosh, editor, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism: Issue 127: Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature, volume 41, number 1, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, →DOI, →ISSN, →JSTOR, →OCLC, pages 40–41 and 44

   Disanthropy is the imagination of the world without humans, inspired by the resurgence of millennial Christianity in the eighteenth century and the discovery of 'deep time' following the publication of [Charles] Lyell's Principles of Geology[…].

   2018, Astrid Bracke, “Ecocriticism and Jim Crace’s Early Novels”, in Katy Shaw, Kate Aughterson, editors, Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan; Springer Nature, →DOI, →ISBN, page 56