Noun

1. Extravagant or flowery writing, especially in a literary work.

Quotations

• 1932, Harry T. Baker, "Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic," PMLA, vol. 47, no. 1, p. 198,

  Swinburne is often a very discerning critic in spite of his penchant for purple prose.

• 1960, "Book of Lamentations" (Review of The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart), Time, 24 Oct.,

  His persecuted characters bleed purple prose, and he persistently confuses an assault on the nerves with a cry from the heart.

• 2004, Joan Huber, "Lenski Effects on Sex Stratification Theory," Sociological Theory, vol. 22, no. 2, p. 261,

  An antibiological bias . . . was stimulated by a flood of popular and scholarly books in the 1960s and 1970s (some awash in deep purple prose) saying that male domination was natural and inevitable.