Mapped
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
The ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver sails from England on four voyages and is cast among the tiny Lilliputians, the giant Brobdingnagians, the mad projectors of flying Laputa, and the rational horses called Houyhnhnms, each a mirror held up to human folly. Swift frames the satire from a real England, and even gives his imaginary lands pseudo-coordinates, so that Gulliver departs from London's docks toward islands placed off Sumatra, the Pacific, Japan and the southern oceans.
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Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Shipwrecked alone on a tropical island near the mouth of the Orinoco, Robinson Crusoe spends twenty-eight years wresting a life from the wilderness, until a footprint in the sand, and the man Friday, change everything. Defoe frames the survival tale with a real geography: the departure from England against his father's wishes, the Brazil plantation he abandons for one last voyage, and the Caribbean island, drawn from the seas off Trinidad and the Orinoco delta, on which he is cast away.
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