Intertextual Properties of British and American Political Cartoons

Journal of Siberian Federal University. Series: Humanities & Social Sciences. 2025. Vol. 18. No. 10. P. 1981–1991.

Natalia G. Milashchenko

This study explores the employment of intertextual elements in editorial cartoons.  The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast the types of precedent phenomena that are used to create British and American political cartoons addressing immigration issues. To this end, the sample of 50 British and 50 American graphical texts published by quality newspapers is analyzed. The research is set in the framework of cognitive stylistics and employs contextual, semantic, stylistic analyses, and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. The findings show that the graphical texts build intertextual ties with such precedent phenomena as precedent fields, utterances, events and situations. Moreover, a new type was revealed, namely, precedent practices denoting habitual actions, some traditional pastime deeply rooted in culture. The study also shows that the cartoonists manipulate precedence-setting tokens to generate multimodal metaphor, metonymy, irony, pun and paronymy. The prior texts tend to be culture specific for American and British cartoons with a notable exception for those connected with the fields of art and mythology. The research opens windows for exploring intertextual properties in different types of multimodal texts.

Keywords: intertextuality, интертекстуальность, humor, юмор, прецедентные феномены, precedent phenomena, мультимодальность, multimodality, editorial cartoons, редакционная карикатура