heterocosm

English

Etymology

From hetero- +‎ (micro)cosm.

Noun

heterocosm (plural heterocosms)

1. A separate or alternative world.
   • 1990, Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

     Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom.

   • 2007, William Poole, “Out of his Furrow”, in London Review of Books, volume 29, number 3, page 16:

     For Teskey, the exemplary poet of hallucination is Spenser, whose Fairyland is a stable heterocosm, which a reader can enter for sustained periods without undergoing any oscillatory experience.