Despite Brexit dominating news headlines and public debate around the world for the past several years, Discourses of Brexit is the first comprehensive publication to focus specifically on discourses surrounding the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Organised chronologically, the volume is divided in two: ‘Discursive drivers of the Brexit vote’ and ‘Discursive consequences of the Brexit vote’. The contributions bring together a variety of data sources, methodologies, and perspectives.

Following the editors’ introduction, which provides important historical and political contextualisation for Brexit, Part 1 examines influential discursive trends leading up to the referendum in June 2016. Nora Wenzl's paper (chapter 3) draws on corpus linguistic techniques to analyse concordances of the phrase we are in a corpus of British parliamentary proceedings, aiming to trace the construction of British national identity in the lead-up to the referendum. The highlight of the section is Piotr Cap's contribution (chapter 5), which details how Nigel Farage used proximisation strategies with increasing frequency over the four years leading up to the vote, in order to portray migrants as both a distant Other and an immediate threat to the ‘well-being, security and identity of the British people’ (70). Marlene Miglbauer & Veronika Koller's chapter complements this with multimodal data from vox pops (chapter 6), in which Leave voters draw on populist discourse to ‘position themselves as… disadvantaged and victimised vis-à-vis the EU’ (99). A common thread throughout Part 1 is the construction among Leave supporters of an us/them dichotomy—where Britons are positioned as homogenous and ‘good’ while Europe represents a domineering and threatening Other—invoked to justify the need to ‘take back control’.

Part 2 of the book deals with the various discursive consequences of the 2016 vote. Massimiliano Demata's contribution (chapter 8) examines Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's heavy use of populist rhetoric—usually associated with the political right—in his postreferendum construction of a dichotomy between ‘the many’ and ‘the few’. There is also a focus on discourse produced by everyday people rather than political officials or mass media, with Susanne Kopf (chapter 10) and Catherine Bouko & David Garcia (chapter 11) examining Wikipedia and Twitter users’ discussions of Brexit respectively. Additionally, Gordana Lalić-Krstin & Nadežda Silaški (chapter 14) highlight the ‘unprecedented linguistic creativity’ of the myriad neologisms coined in the discourse surrounding Brexit, concluding that such playful terms (e.g. ‘Brexageddon’) serve, among other things, as a means for individuals to cope with the tumultuous environment created by the referendum.

Several chapters point out that Remain supporters often draw on discursive strategies more strongly associated with the Leave campaign, a failure that, it is argued, ultimately contributed to the referendum outcome. Most authors bring a critical perspective to their analyses, and the important role of populism is highlighted throughout. Offering insightful analysis of one of the most significant political events of the contemporary era, this book brings well-deserved attention to the phenomenon of Brexit as a site of rich discursive data.