Booktubers’ video reviews as literary mediation spaces

Abstract

As part of the research field on the reading practices of booktubers, this study proposes to characterize the communicative function and the discursive genre of video reviews taking into account the communicative, literary and discursive dimension. 17 video reviews posted on YouTube are selected from 17 different booktuber channels from various countries in Latin America and Spain. The results show the organization of the content of the video reviews in a textual superstructure similar to that of the traditional literary review: introduction-development-closure. The booktubers reinterpret this textual structure in a new communicative context (YouTube) and make it concrete in a particular discursive structure (contextualization, book presentation, relations with the publisher, literary analysis and appeal to the audience), thus consolidating a new audiovisual concretion of the literary review  that represents a new context of literary mediation on the Internet.