The Literature Network - Bodice-ripping challenges Jane Austen TV cult

Bodice-ripping challenges Jane Austen TV cult

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 19961212
Author:Marianne Macdonald Media Correspondent

The television community was last night speculating that ITV's bawdy romp Moll Flanders, which finished on Monday and featured 17 sex scenes, would unleash a spate of copycat bodice-rippers.

For its triumphant ratings success has single-handedly broken the taboo that costume drama is best a la Jane Austen: understated, genteel and very definitely sex-free.

The mid-Nineties reinterpretation of the genre, as demonstrated by Moll, has demolished that theory. Virgins can be replaced with wenches, ballrooms with brothels. Chastity is out. Sex, even incest, is in. It is the last bastion to fall in ...

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