"All Brexplained!" - Popularising Brexit to Younger Generations

The aim of this contribution is to discuss the popularisation strategies adopted in texts destined for children which deal with the topic of Brexit. Starting from the hypothesis that the age and the profile of the target reader have a strong bearing on the structure and nature of a text and that popularisation strategies might be adjusted in different ways, I will attempt to ascertain which popularisation strategies are used in relation to the age of the addressee. To this purpose I will concentrate on two books, BREXIT: Britain's decision to leave the European Union by Daniel Nunn (2016), I WANT TO LEAVE THIS BOOK! by Richard David Lawman and Katie Williams (2019), which address two different age groups. Consequently, the theme of Brexit is treated in different ways, both in terms of content and language. Attention is paid to examples that highlight popularisation strategies on the basis of the verbal and the visual elements characterising them. The basic methodological framework of this study is discourse analysis, with reliance on notions taken from multimodality. This provides instruments suitable for identifying cases where the visual mode interacts with the verbal mode to support popularisation strategies.