BLURB AS A PARATEXTUAL ELEMENT

Abstract

The article deals with the analysis of the blurb (a review excerpt placed on the book cover and on the opening pages) as a paratextual element. It discusses its various definitions, generalizes the existing results of linguistic researches of this phenomenon, points out its dual nature (i.e. belonging to the both paratextual categories, peritext and epitext), and defines its genre-making and linguostylistic peculiarities. The review extract-based blurbs from five legal thrillers ‘The Partner’, ‘The Pelican Brief’, ‘The Rainmaker’, ‘The Runaway Jury’, and ‘The Street Lawyer’ by John Grisham serve as the empirical material for the research. The present paper investigates the common strategies characterizing the promotional genre of book blurbs (description and evaluation) as well as the common features shared by the paratextual elements in question: performing promotional and to some extent informative functions, all of them are aimed at attracting, intriguing, persuading and tempting the reader by means of ‘contextually motivated language choices’ as well as ‘emotive and forceful style’, a wide range of expressive means and stylistic devices (phonetic, lexical and syntactical) which are typical of the language of the legal thrillers’ blurbs. Among the stylistic devices that serve as the readers’ ‘eye catchers’ are epithets, metaphors, parallelisms and inversions.