Brobdingnag Brobdingnag Brobdingnag is a fictional land in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel "Gulliver's Travels" occupied by giants. Lemuel Gulliver visits the land after the ship on which he is travelling is blown off course and he is separated from a party exploring the unknown land. In the second preface to the book, Gulliver laments that this is a misspelling introduced by the publisher and the land is actually called Brobdingrag. The adjective "Brobdingnagian" has come to describe anything of colossal size. Swift describes the location of Brobdingnag, and its geography, in the text of Part II of "Gullivers Travels", and
Gulliver's Travels Daniel Defoe's wildly successful "Robinson Crusoe", "Gulliver's Travels" may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. In "The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man", Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous