From Narratives to Intensification and Hyperbole: Promotional Uses of Book Blurbs
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to investigate evaluation in book blurbs. 2 Backcover blurbs of bestsellers by well-known writers and fictional debuts are mainly evaluative-persuasive texts. They summarize the main features of the book and provide a mostly subjective evaluation of the book using a restricted set of lexical, pragmatic and textual devices. As such they serve both an informative and a promotional function or, in terms of Kotler and Armstrong’s (1993) model of marketing strategies, they position and market the book. Description and evaluation are found to be used in various combinations in promotional genres like book blurbs (Bhatia, 2004: 60), and are shown to be a feature of academic blurbs (Gesuato, 2004). However, this doesn’t seem to be true of book blurbs taken from lazy reads, in which positioning the product and informing customers about its quality is almost exclusively done by means of optional narratives and obligatory evaluations, most often in the form of quotations from book reviews, and subjective descriptions (if present at all) are functional to evaluate the book and promote it.
Author: Silvia Cacchiani
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7030471708