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“The cover art, which was absolutely about period clothing, was probably where the term originated,” says Kamblé. These were the only books available for voracious romance readers, and publishers interpreted high sales numbers as a sign that formulaic and camp book covers worked. Featuring women with chests heaving out of their tight dresses, clutched in the muscled arms of men with open shirts, scantily clad characters quickly became a visual shorthand that appealed to the male gaze and signaled to readers what kind of storyline they could expect. Before female readers could buy books, stores had to stock them, and it’s widely understood within publishing that salacious covers were made to appeal to male booksellers and their expectations of the genre. As male cover artists transitioned from working on the pulp novels of the 1940s and 1950s, they carried over a style and artistic point of view that focused on how female characters looked. While books were written for voracious female audiences, it’s largely agreed that covers were designed for men.
FUNNY NAMES FOR HARLEQUIN ROMANCE NOVELS SERIES
The bodice ripper moniker has followed the Outlander series since the first book was released in 1991, and author Diana Gabaldon publicly distanced herself from the romance community, likely in an attempt to appeal to audiences scared away by the genre’s lowbrow reputation.Ĭover art is in large part to thank for this enduring reputation. While the content and style of romance books has evolved, the term “bodice ripper” has hung around, largely as a joke made at the expense of romance novels, partially in homages made by contemporary romance writers, and in large part because there’s just something so evocative about the term. This was where the cheesy book covers we associate with romance novels (and later Fabio) came from. Replacing shorter and serialized novels with more sexually explicit books inspired by the popularity of The Flame and the Flower, released in 1972, bodice rippers met reader demand and flooded the market with mass-produced romances. While historical romance remains a major part of the romantic fiction genre today, experts agree that bodice rippers describe a short and specific moment in American publishing history that lasted only between the early 1970s and mid-1980s. “In the popular imagination, the term is used very loosely, I would dare say promiscuously,” laughs Jayashree Kamblé, a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College and author of Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction. “In the popular imagination, the term is used very loosely, I would dare say promiscuously.”