Literary experience and the book trailer as intermedial paratext

The article explores the characteristics and variations of the book trailer genre in light of the different ways in which book trailers stage the literary experience of their source texts. The book trailer’s intermedial character as audiovisual representation of linguistic texts raises a ‘question of representation’ that poses a significant artistic challenge and potentially violates the virtual quality of the literary reading experience. On the basis of an extensive sample, a number of book trailers are analysed and a tentative book trailer typology is established based on different modes of addressing the genre’s inherent ‘question of representation’.