Population in literature

摘要

"Adam and eve," wrote George Bernard Shaw in his ambitious play Back to Methuselah, "were hung up on two frightful possibilities. One was the extinction of mankind by their accidental death. The other was the prospect of living forever. They could bear neither. Consequently, they had to invent natural birth and natural death, which are, after all, only modes of perpetuating life without putting on any single creature the terrible burden of immortality." Thus not only the human race, but the scienceof demography was born. Yet in demographic terms, for over a century Westerners have seemed unable to decide what they fear most. The precipitous drop in European fertility rates has produced anxiety about numerical dwindling, latterly echoed even in the United States. Yet the sixfold increase in worldwide population since the early 1800s has prompted a contrary fear of crushing biological overload. Given the emotive nature of these opposing horrors--We are about to disappear! vs. We are being overrun!--it is less surprising that population issues have filtered into the Western literary canon than that their direct treatment in mainstream literature is so rare.