[a professor from The Grand Academy on Balnibarbi shows Gulliver his book of research on language] · Centre for Early Modern Visual Culture

Title: [a professor from The Grand Academy on Balnibarbi shows Gulliver his book of research on language]
Subject: fictional works; imaginary places; Fictitious characters; imaginary creatures; scholars in literature; Scientists in literature; satire
Period: 1800-1850;
Description: Here we see a professor from the Grand Academy on Balnibarbi holding a book which is filled with parts of sentences created by his machine. This machine had all the words in the language of Balnibarbi in different moods, tenses, and declensions written on blocks. These blocks were held together by wires on a frame, and students of the professor would rotate the handles, forming different arrangements of the words. They would then find sentence fragments and record them in this book. The goal of this experiment was to create a complete body of work that comprised all of the arts and sciences. The same image appears in the 1843 Krabbe edition.
Image Creator: Grandville (Illustrator)
Type: StillImage; Book Illustrations
Identifier: mta:21007
Language: ger
Source Name: Gulliver's Reisen in unbekannte Länder
Parent Collection: 1839 Stuttgart Grandville vol. 2
Image: mta_21007_OBJ.png