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From Narratives to Intensification and Hyperbole: Promotional Uses of Book Blurbs

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate evaluation in book blurbs. 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. In the light of this, I shall therefore concentrate on the lexical and discoursepragmatic features of evaluative language in book blurbs using a corpus of around 200 book blurbs of lazy reads (BB corpus). As illustrated in Section 1 via a comparison of the generic structure of book-blurbs and book reviews of fiction (BR corpus: around 160 reviews, all taken from The Economist, years 2004-2006), back-cover blurbs from lazy reads only seem to share the Identification and Endorsement moves, with quality attributing sentences representing the basic text idiom (term from Werlich, 1976/1983). After touching upon the relationship between evaluation/comment, characterization, description and subjective narratives in Section 2, I shall turn to the lexical and pragmatic features of evaluative language in Section 3. The focus will be on type of evaluation and on the extent to which lexical resources construct positive affect (I loved it), appreciation (engaging) and/or judgment (truthful) (Martin and White, 2005) in book blurbs. Graduation of engagement and attitude will be investigated within the framework of speech act theory and speech act modification (Searle and Vandervecken, 1985; Merlini Barbaresi, 1997; Sbisà, 2001). Second, using the WordSmith Tools suite of software (Scott, 1999) I shall generate a keyword list for the book blurb corpus and then focus on the collocational profile of funny, the most key content word in the corpus. The purpose of this part of the analysis is therefore twofold: first, to identify diverse lexico-grammatical patterns which can be