• Blurbs
• English
• Fiction

The purpose of this investigation is to analyse the nature of blurbs, short texts generally displayed on the back covers of books, which provide information about the book’s content and author, and praise the book by showing excerpts from experts’ favourable reviews, in order to promote the book and attract potential readers.
These texts have existed for a long time and proliferated with the advent of paperbacks, but have only recently become the subject of critical and academic studies.
Furthermore, in the last few decades the new means of communication provided by the World Wide Web has added new possibilities for advertising books, and blurbs have also become digital.
This analysis is therefore based both on traditional blurbs and digital blurbs, or e-blurbs. I have gathered a corpus of 70 blurbs from personal books and 70 blurbs from Internet sites, namely Amazon.co.uk (www.amazon.co.uk) and the Penguin Books (www.penguin.co.uk) website.
Therefore, my analysis will focus on generic, linguistic and semantic aspects of this particular kind of text.
My first concern has been to offer a few definitions of the word “blurb”, taken from traditional and online dictionaries.
Secondly, I have provided a brief overview of genre theory, taking into account Swales and Bhatia’s findings in this field, and its application to blurbs as a genre belonging to the colony of promotional genres.
Then, I have analysed the rhetorical structure of blurbs, considering the previous suggestions made by Gea Valor, Marčiulionienė and Cacchiani.
Moreover, I have investigated the lexico-semantic properties of the language of blurbs and have identified the main semantic fields of blurb’s vocabulary.
Finally, I have dealt with linguistic and discourse conventions typical of advertising and journalistic discourse, such as the use of modifiers, elliptical syntactic patterns, and the use of the imperative.