ABSTRACT
Based on a comparison of a small subset of the austerity corpus for texts that also contain the search term Brexit with a corpus of tweets that include austerity and Brexit as well, this chapter offers an explanatory critique of the cultural political economy of Brexit in the age of austerity with the help of a corpus-assisted critical realist multimedia discourse analysis. Building on the foundations of critical realism in general and the cultural political economy approach in particular, it shows that different forms of ideological problem-solving imaginaries dominate in all media. Indeed, of all the articles in the corpus, only very few contain articulations that at least point in the direction of a non-ideological critical imaginary – and all these articles are from The Guardian. But such an imaginary faces some structural disadvantages because it is not grounded in the British variety of capitalism like neoliberal, Keynesian or other problem-solving imaginaries. The chapter concludes with a plea for the articulation of a utopian imaginary based on solidarity and love that, despite the force and endurance of capitalism, at least upholds the faith in the future of mankind and provides the means for human emancipation.
