bodice-ripper n.
a historical novel (or film), with a greater than usual emphasis on sex, esp. the seduction or even rape of the heroine.
![]() | Chicago Trib. 8 Feb. 16/1: Publishers call them hot historicals as opposed to the virginal variety [...] or to the bodice rippers. | |
![]() | (ref. to 1970s) | Love’s $weet Return 66: The gothic [novel] gave way to the predominantly American-authored ‘bodice-ripper’ in the 1970s. The name [...] was derived from the frequent rapes and sexual assaults that the heroines experienced.|
![]() | Indep. 30 Oct. n.p.: Prototype bodice-ripper with 17th-century wild child Lorna [...] falling for her clan’s avowed enemy. | |
![]() | Get Your Cock Out 84: ‘I want to savour your body like wine’. Dandy didn’t know where the fuck that little piece of poetry had come from, probably one of her mother’s bodice rippers. | |
![]() | (ref. to mid-1970s) | Lost Library 34: Around 1975, a college friend lent me his copy of Gordon Merrick’s 1970 man-on-man bodice-ripper, The Lord Won’t Mind [Simes:DLSS].|
![]() | Widespread Panic 305: ‘I’m not calling them smut, but I’d call them “bodice-rippers,” with lots of skin and some pretty smutty scenes’. |