Ruritania
|
|
Ruritania is an imaginary kingdom in Central Europe, the setting of three novels by the writer Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), The Heart of Princess Osra (1896), and Rupert of Hentzau (1898). It is also the setting of sequels and variations by other writers, including Simon Hawke's science-fiction re-working The Zenda Vendetta (Time Wars Book 4) (1985), and John Spurling's humorous post-Cold War thriller After Zenda (1995).
In Hope's oeuvre, Ruritania is depicted as a German-speaking, Roman Catholic country under an absolute monarchy, with deep social divisions reflected in the conflicts of the first novel. Geographically, it is located between Saxony and Bohemia—the author indicates that the capital city, Strelsau, lies on the railway line between Dresden and Prague. Hope's novels give the impression that Ruritania would not be a pleasant place to inhabit, with its feckless, autocratic king, police surveillance of suspected subversives, and society deeply polarised between rich and poor. However, stage and film versions sanitised and romanticised the setting, ignoring Hope's references to the poverty and political unrest in Strelsau's Old City, and depicted instead a picturesque fairy-tale kingdom. Among the later novelists to use this setting, neither Hawke nor Spurling adheres to the Hope canon; their works show influences from the film adaptations. Hawke relocates Ruritania to the Balkans, and makes it smaller and more socially cohesive; Spurling introduces ethnic/linguistic divisions.
Hope's novels resulted in "Ruritania" becoming a generic term for any imaginary kingdom used as the setting for romance, intrigue and adventure. In Evelyn Waugh's 1930 comedic novel Vile Bodies, one character is a deposed and maudlin "ex-King of Ruritania." It lent its name to a whole genre of writing, the Ruritanian Romance, including the Graustark novels by George Barr McCutcheon.
"Ruritania" is also the name of a hypothetical country used by members of the Austrian School of economics to teach economic concepts. Some well known economists who have adopted this tradition are Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt and Walter Block
Ruritania is also a Jugendstil fraktur typeface, by Australian designer Paul J. Lloyd.he:רוריטניה