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Middlemarch vocabulary
22 places mentioned
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Brobdingnag
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tags: [geography]
► definition
Definition:land from Gulliver's travels where everything is enormous; located off the coast of Washington state
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Uses:
Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726; and, although it was by no means intended for them, the book was soon appropriated by the children, who have ever since continued to regard it as one of the most delightful of their story books. They cannot comprehend the occasion which provoked the book nor appreciate the satire which underlies the narrative, but they delight in the wonderful adventures, and wander full of open-eyed astonishment into the new worlds through which the vivid and logically accurate imagination of the author so personally conducts them. And there is a meaning and a moral in the stories of the Voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag which is entirely apart from the political satire they are intended to convey, a meaning and a moral which the youngest child who can read it will not fail to seize, and upon which it is scarcely necessary for the teacher to comment.
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (1726)
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Brobdingrag (for so the word should have been spelt, and not erroneously Brobdingnag),
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (intro)
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I had thought they were adults and maybe citizens of Brobdingnag, at least.
Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
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Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth’s surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of the one realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women, of the other.
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Brother Jonah, for example (there are such unpleasant people in most families; perhaps even in the highest aristocracy there are Brobdingnag specimens, gigantically in debt and bloated at greater expense)
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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