Purple prose is a term of literary criticism used to describe passages, or sometimes entire literary works, written in prose so extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw attention to itself. Purple prose is sensually evocative beyond the requirements of its context. It also refers to writing that employs certain rhetorical effects such as exaggerated sentiment or pathos in an attempt to manipulate a reader's response.
When it is limited to certain passages, they may be termed purple patches or purple passages; these are often noted as standing out from the rest of the work.
The term purple patch is also used in a more general, and more unequivocally positive, sense to refer to a period of outstanding achievement. This usage is particularly common in sporting contexts in some countries; for example, a footballer who had scored in six successive games might be said to be "enjoying a purple patch".[1]
Contents |
The term "purple prose" is derived from a reference by the Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BCE) who wrote in his Ars Poetica (lines 14-21):[2]
| Inceptis grauibus plerumque et magna professis purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter adsuitur pannus, cum lucus et ara Dianae et properantis aquae per amoenos ambitus agros aut flumen Rhenum aut pluuius describitur arcus; sed nunc non erat his locus. Et fortasse cupressum scis simulare; quid hoc, si fractis enatat exspes nauibus, aere dato qui pingitur? |
"Your opening shows great promise, and yet flashy purple patches; as when describing a sacred grove, or the altar of Diana, or a stream meandering through fields, or the river Rhine, or a rainbow; but this was not the place for them. If you can realistically render a cypress tree, would you include one when commissioned to paint a sailor in the midst of a shipwreck?" |
Purpureus meant lustrous or dazzling in Horace's Latin.[3]
A frequently cited example of purple prose is the penultimate paragraph of The Garden of Cyrus by Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), first published in 1658:
A more recent author famous for purple prose is Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73), who begins his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the sentence:
Often shortened to just "It was a dark and stormy night", this opening has given rise to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants are asked to supply similarly florid opening sentences to their own otherwise imaginary novels. (While the preceding sentence is often mocked as an example of purple prose, it is probably more correctly labeled an example of a clumsy digression. Note that removing the parenthetical reference to London mostly repairs the damage.)
Other instances of purple prose quoted from the novel include "As soon as the Promethean spark had been fully communicated to the lady's tube" (meaning Once the lady lit her pipe), "a nectarian beverage" (wine), "a somnambular accommodation" (a bedroom), and so on.
John Ruskin prefaced his contrast of the Mediterranean with the Northern (Gothic) landscape, architecture, and character in "The Nature of Gothic" with an imaginary stratospheric flight, seeing:
Modern instances of purple prose can often be found in romance novels. These started alluding to sex in the 1970s, and authors, not wanting to be either pornographic or clinical in their descriptions, developed many euphemisms to describe body parts and sexual activity. Examples include "throbbing manhood", "quivering desire", "[he] filled her with the hot wet tumult of his love", and the much-parodied "explode with delight".
Romance writers are aware of the problem, with Deb Stover contributing an essay "The Purple Prose Eater" to the book How to Write a Romance For The New Markets (1999).
Modern critics use "purple prose" to refer to any writing that is undermined by its over-stylized and formulaic nature. Many pulp genres have become infamous for excesses of purple prose, including romance, mystery, and adventure; likewise, in journalism, the term is often used to refer to writing that places tone and emotional heft over factual reporting.
A few writers in these genres have adopted the term as a badge of pride: a fanzine called Purple Prose was devoted to the documenting of purple prose in the pulps; the Purple Prose Press was a publisher (now defunct) which specialized in re-printing material from the pulps; and for a time there was an online magazine called, simply, PurpleProse.
When referring to writing published on the Internet, e.g., fanfiction, this phrase is sometimes written as "urple prose," with the misspelling satirizing the simple spelling errors present in much of Internet fanfiction. "Urple" can also be a reference to vomiting, a possible reaction to reading extremely purple prose.