Lying on a riverbank on a lazy summer’s afternoon – 23rd June 2016, to be precise – Alice spots a flustered-looking white rabbit called Dave calling for a referendum. Following him down a rabbit-hole, she emerges into a strange new land, where up is down, black is white, experts are fools and fools are experts... She meets such characters as the Corbynpillar, who sits on a toadstool smoking his hookah and being no help to anyone; Humpty Trumpty, perched on a wall he wants the Mexicans to pay for; the Cheshire Twat, who likes to disappear leaving only his grin, a pint, and the smell of scotch eggs remaining; and the terrifying Queen of Heartlessness, who’ll take off your head if you dare question her plan for Brexit. Will Alice ever be able to find anyone who speaks sense?

Since 2016 there has been an outpouring of humour, comedy and satire on the United Kingdom’s EU Referendum and decision to leave the EU, or Brexit. This book examines the relationship between Brexit and its comedy, exploring how Brexit and comedy are connected in both Leave and Remain discourse. It argues that both populism and comedy are rhetorical in nature and so are linked through their semantic structure and communicative potential. Considering the incongruities that Brexit presents for British society, the author analyses the populism that has emerged from those incongruities in the form of ironic, ambiguous and dichotomous discourse. Through the analysis of a range of comedy on the EU Referendum and Brexit, including material from stand-up and situation comedy, and political satire of various types, The Rhetoric of Brexit Humour examines the way in which comedy acts as a rhetoric that draws on, supports and attacks the discourses of Brexit. This provides not just an advance in our understanding of political satire but also a clearer description of the nature of populism. This book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, media and communications scholars, and anyone interested in Brexit, populism and comedy.

This volume explores the cultural significance of Brexit, situating it in debates about nation and identity. Contributors to this collection seek to contextualize Britain's decision to leave the EU and to assess its reverberations in language, literature, and culture. Addressing such aspects as British exceptionalism, myth-making, medievalism, and nostalgia, contributions range from travelogues, Ladybird books, and rural cinema-going to ageing. An important focus lies on marginalized groups and geographical fringes, as contributors attend to the Irish situation and the scarcity of EU migrants in Brexit literature (BrexLit). Finally, two essays widen the perspective to assess American parallels to the discourses about a Brexit that is still far from "done."

This volume on the term “Europe” is based on a conference that took place in the winter of 2018 at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich. Europe in its complexity, in its character of radical change and its power of fascination is of unbroken topicality. At the same time, European identity is endangered by current challenges such as populism and the rise of nationalism. The contributions to the conference address the question of the extent to which contemporary literature and also current films react to these upheavals and to what extent the talk of a crisis in Europe or European integration is perceptible in the areas of literature and film. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Europa im Umbruch edited by Michaela Nicole Raß and Kay Wolfinger, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

Europe is a broad and multifaceted construct, variously understood as a geographical, political, legal, institutional, social, or cultural formation. It is characterized by numerous conflicts and processes of negotiation that have accompanied or sustained the development of normative orders and divergent conceptions of law, both in relation to individual states and to Europe as a whole. The same applies to the field of literature, language, and aesthetics; numerous myths and ideologies have shaped today’s understanding of Europe and still support it today. This volume examines how such processes were legally structured, and literarily addressed, criticized, and complemented. Its interdisciplinary perspective and open and dynamic, both dialogical and dialectical format intends to replicate the fragmented, sometimes conflicting, but always productive mosaic of voices, ideas, and concepts that have constituted and still constitute Europe, whether in the past, present, or future. Instead of resolving any of the complexities and contradictions that frame discussions on law, literature, and Europe, it aims to induce further engagement and confrontations with new and alternative visions of Europe.

This book looks at the cultural, political and economic conditions of British Euroscepticism. Focusing on eight British dystopian novels, published in the years before the decisive In/Out-Referendum, and taking into account cultural, political and economic contexts, Lisa Bischoff shows how the novels’ stance towards the integration project range from slight criticism to outright hostility. The wide availability of the novels, and the prominence of both its authors and readers, among which are political figures David Cameron, Nigel Farage and Daniel Hannan, amplify the power of literary Euroscepticism. Drawing on cultural studies, literature and social science, British Novels and the European Union reveals the many facets of British Euroscepticism.

This book examines the many reincarnations of Carroll’s texts, illuminating how the meaning of the original books has been re-negotiated through adaptations, appropriations, and transmediality. The volume is an edited collection of eighteen essays and is divided into three sections that examine the re-interpretations of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in literature, film, and other media (including the branches of commerce, music videos, videogames, and madness studies). This collection is an addition to the existing work on Alice in Wonderland and its sequels, adaptations, and appropriations, and helps readers to have a more comprehensive view of the extent to which the Alice story world is vast and always growing.