Disanthropy
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A misanthropic desire for a world without human life, expressed in literature. uncountable, usually
"[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: […]"
Example
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: […]"
Etymology
PIE word *dwís From dis- (prefix meaning ‘against; not’) + -anthropy (suffix meaning ‘humanity’), modelled after misanthropy. The word was coined by the Canadian literary critic Greg Garrard in a 2012 article published in SubStance: see the quotation.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.