New Holland and the islands of the south seas. The “New Discoveries” as seen in late eighteenth-century geography schoolbooks for children

The paper analyzes a corpus of geography schoolbooks written specifically for children in order to assess how the newly discovered territories were portrayed, in particular those of New Holland and the islands in the Pacific Ocean, and whether and how the authors rendered these texts linguistically accessible for their intended audience. As books targeting children are informed and shaped by ideology and thus promote the dominant worldview, the study provides an insight into the emergence of a new European—and British—identity, that of the nineteenth-century imperialist, who explores and appropriates the new lands and their resources. The analysis also shows how accommodation is mostly achieved through the use of some proximity strategies, like comparison, explanation and exemplification.