The Metaphorical Representation of Brexit in Digital Political Cartoons

Abstract

Britain's withdrawal from the European Union (“Brexit”) in June 2016 has been one of the biggest issues in British politics and has received wide media coverage because of its consequences for both the UK and the European Union. This article explores the visual representation of Brexit in political cartooning through the analysis of a corpus of digital cartoons. The analysis yields two findings: (1) Brexit is shaped on the basis of a set of metaphors that can be subsumed within metaphor scenarios—the family scenario or the journey scenario; (2) the metaphors used to conceptualize this issue are used either to provide a justification for Brexit or evaluate UK's withdrawal from the EU positively or negatively.