Ruritanian Romance
Encyclopedia
Fictional country
A fictional country is a country that is made up for fictional stories, and does not exist in real life, or one that people believe in without proof....
, usually in Central
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
or Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
, such as the Ruritania
Ruritania
Ruritania is a fictional country in central Europe which forms the setting for three books by Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda , The Heart of Princess Osra , and Rupert of Hentzau...
that gave the genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
its name. The popularity of the Graustark
Graustark
Graustark is a fictional country in Eastern Europe used as a setting for several novels by George Barr McCutcheon. Graustark's neighbors, which also figure into the stories, are Axphain to the north and Dawsbergen to the south....
novels led to this type of story also being called Graustarkian Romances.
Such stories are typically swashbuckling
Swashbuckler
Swashbuckler or swasher is a term that emerged in the 16th century and has been used for rough, noisy and boastful swordsmen ever since. A possible explanation for this term is that it derives from a fighting style using a side-sword with a buckler in the off-hand, which was applied with much...
adventure novel
Adventure novel
The adventure novel is a genre of novels that has adventure, an exciting undertaking involving risk and physical danger, as its main theme.-History:...
s, tales of high romance and intrigue, centered on the upper classes, aristocracy and royalty.John Clute
John Clute
John Frederick Clute is a Canadian born author and critic who has lived in Britain since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part of science fiction's history."...
and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is a 1997 reference work on fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant. Other contributors include Mike Ashley, Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, David Langford, Sam J. Lundwall, Michael Scott Rohan, Brian Stableford and Lisa Tuttle.The book was well-received upon...
p826 ISBN9780312198695 The themes of honor, loyalty
Loyalty
Loyalty is faithfulness or a devotion to a person, country, group, or cause There are many aspects to...
, and love
Love
Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels...
predominate, and the books frequently feature the restoration of kings to their thrones.
Although recognizable Ruritanian romances such as Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
's Prince Otto
Prince Otto
Prince Otto: A Romance is a novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1885.The novel was largely written during 1883. Stevenson referred to Prince Otto as "my hardest effort", one of the chapters was rewritten eight times by Stevenson and once by his wife.The Robert Louis...
were written prior to Anthony Hope
Anthony Hope
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope , was an English novelist and playwright. Although he was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels, he is remembered best for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau...
's The Prisoner of Zenda
The Prisoner of Zenda
The Prisoner of Zenda is an adventure novel by Anthony Hope, published in 1894. The king of the fictional country of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus unable to attend his own coronation. Political forces are such that in order for the king to retain his crown his...
, that 1894 novel
1894 in literature
The year 1894 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*Robert Frost sells his first poem, "My Butterfly", to The New York Independent for fifteen dollars.*Hermann Hesse begins his apprenticeship at a factory in Calw....
set the type, with its handsome political decoy
Political decoy
A political decoy is a person employed to impersonate a politician, in order to draw attention away from the real person or to take risks on their behalf...
restoring the rightful king to the throne, and resulted in a burst of similar popular fiction, such as George Barr McCutcheon
George Barr McCutcheon
George Barr McCutcheon was an American popular novelist and playwright. His best known works include the series of novels set in Graustark, a fictional East European country, Brewster's Millions, a play and several films....
's Graustark novels and Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was an English playwright and author. She is best known for her children's stories, in particular The Secret Garden , A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy.Born Frances Eliza Hodgson, she lived in Cheetham Hill, Manchester...
's The Lost Prince
The Lost Prince (novel)
The Lost Prince is a novel by British-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1915.-Plot summary:This book is about Marco Loristan, his father, and his friend, a street urchin named The Rat. Marco's father, Stefan, is a Samavian patriot working to overthrow the cruel...
and other homages.
The genre was widely spoofed and mocked. George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
's Arms and the Man
Arms and the Man
Arms and the Man is a comedy by George Bernard Shaw, whose title comes from the opening words of Virgil's Aeneid in Latin:"Arma virumque cano" ....
parodied many elements. Dorothy Sayers's Have His Carcase
Have His Carcase
Have His Carcase is a 1932 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her seventh featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and her second novel in which Harriet Vane appears...
featured as the murder victim a man deceived by his murderers because of his foolish belief in his royal ancestry, fed by endless reading of Ruritanian romances. In Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
's Pale Fire
Pale Fire
Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the poet. Together these elements form a narrative in which both authors are...
, the main narrator has the delusion of being the incognito king of a "distant northern land" who romantically escaped a Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
-backed revolution. The Marx Brothers
Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act, originally from New York City, that enjoyed success in Vaudeville, Broadway, and motion pictures from the early 1900s to around 1950...
film Duck Soup is set in a bankrupt Freedonia
Freedonia
Freedonian was probably first used by Americans immediately after the American Revolution in place of the demonym "American". The term Freedonia was later popularized by the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, as a fictional country. Over time, however, the word has come to have a more generic...
. In the satire The Mouse That Roared
The Mouse That Roared
The Mouse That Roared is a 1955 Cold War satirical novel by Irish-American writer Leonard Wibberley, which launched a series of satirical books about an imaginary country in Europe called the Duchy of Grand Fenwick...
, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick
Grand Fenwick
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is a tiny fictional country created by Leonard Wibberley in a series of comedic novels beginning with The Mouse That Roared , which was later made into a film.-History and topography:...
attempts to avoid bankruptcy by declaring war on the United States as a ploy for gaining American aid.
The popularity of the genre declined after the first part of the twentieth century. Aside from the change in literary taste, the royalist elements of Ruritanian romances became less plausible as many European monarchies receded even from memory, and their restorations grew less likely.
Many elements of the genre have been transplanted into fantasy world
Fantasy world
A fantasy world is a fictional universe used in fantasy novels and games. Typical worlds involve magic or magical abilities and often, but not always, either a medieval or futuristic theme...
s, particularly those of fantasy of manners
Fantasy of manners
The fantasy of manners is a subgenre of fantasy literature that also partakes of the nature of a comedy of manners . Such works generally take place in an urban setting and within the confines of a fairly elaborate, and almost always hierarchical, social structure. The term was first used in print...
and alternate history. The science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
writer Andre Norton
Andre Norton
Andre Alice Norton, née Alice Mary Norton was an American science fiction and fantasy author under the noms de plume Andre Norton, Andrew North and Allen Weston...
first reached success with a 1934 Ruritanian novel, The Prince Commands.John Clute
John Clute
John Frederick Clute is a Canadian born author and critic who has lived in Britain since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part of science fiction's history."...
and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is a 1997 reference work on fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant. Other contributors include Mike Ashley, Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, David Langford, Sam J. Lundwall, Michael Scott Rohan, Brian Stableford and Lisa Tuttle.The book was well-received upon...
p827 ISBN9780312198695 Although "Ruritania" originally referred to a contemporary country, the idea has been adapted for use in historical fiction
Historical fiction
Historical fiction tells a story that is set in the past. That setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the principal characters tend to be fictional...
. A subgenre of this is historical romance
Historical romance
Historical romance is a subgenre of two literary genres, the romance novel and the historical novel.-Definition:Historical romance is set before World War II...
, such as Jennifer Blake's Royal Seduction and its sequel Royal Passion; both are set in the nineteenth century and feature Prince Rolfe (later King) and his son Prince Roderic respectively, of the fictional Balkan country of Ruthenia.
The countries of Syldavia
Syldavia
Syldavia is a fictional Balkan kingdom featured in The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé. The name was derived from TranSYLvania and MolDAVIA.-Overview:...
and Borduria
Borduria
Borduria is a fictional country in the comic strip series The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé. It is located in the Balkans and has a rivalry with the fictional neighbouring country of Syldavia. Borduria is depicted in King Ottokar's Sceptre and The Calculus Affair, and is referred to in Tintin and...
, in "The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist , who wrote under the pen name of Hergé...
" are clearly literary descendants of Ruritania, this origin especially accentuated by the classical Ruritarian plot device of identical twins - one good, the other bad - used to resolve a mystery in "King Ottokar's Sceptre
King Ottokar's Sceptre
King Ottokar's Sceptre is the eighth of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring the young reporter Tintin. It was first serialized as a black-and-white comic strip in Le Petit Vingtième on 4 August...
".
Eric Ambler
Eric Ambler
Eric Clifford Ambler OBE was an influential British author of spy novels who introduced a new realism to the genre. Ambler also used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.-Life:...
's 1936 novel "The Dark Frontier
The Dark Frontier
The Dark Frontier is Eric Ambler's first novel, about whose genesis he writes: "[…] Became press agent for film star, but soon after joined big London advertising agency as copywriter and "ideas man". During next few years wrote incessantly on variety of subjects ranging from baby food to...
", taking place at the fictional East European country of Ixania, both uses and parodies the main elements of this sub-genre. And its influence is also evident in the first scenes of Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
's "A king in New York
A King in New York
A King in New York is a 1957 British comedy film directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin in his last leading role, which presents a satirical view of certain aspects of United States politics and society. The film was produced in Europe after Chaplin's exile from the US in 1952...
", where King Igor Shahdov is dethroned and escapes his unnamed country for America. The sinister Crown Prince Rudolf, whose country is never named and who confronts Simon Templar
Simon Templar
Simon Templar is a British fictional character known as The Saint featured in a long-running series of books by Leslie Charteris published between 1928 and 1963. After that date, other authors collaborated with Charteris on books until 1983; two additional works produced without Charteris’s...
in several books of the 1930's also has Ruritanian overtones.
In an odd take on the genre, the 1956 British sci-fi movie The Gamma People
The Gamma People
The Gamma People is a 1956 British science fiction film directed by John Gilling and starring Paul Douglas, Eva Bartok and Leslie Phillips.-Plot:...
is set in Gudavia, a Ruritanian-style central European dictatorship.
Latveria
Latveria
Latveria is a nation in the . It is an isolated European country ruled by the supervillain Doctor Doom, supposedly located in the Banat region. It is surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains, and also borders the Symkaria to the south. Its capital is Doomstadt.-Publication history:Latveria first...
, ruled by Doctor Doom
Doctor Doom
Victor von Doom is a fictional character who appears in Marvel Comics publications . Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the character first appeared in Fantastic Four #5 wearing his trademark metal mask and green cloak...
in the Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...
Universe, is a recognisable late addition to the genre - with the manifest anachronism of the series placing an absolute monarchy
Absolute monarchy
Absolute monarchy is a monarchical form of government in which the monarch exercises ultimate governing authority as head of state and head of government, his or her power not being limited by a constitution or by the law. An absolute monarch thus wields unrestricted political power over the...
in post-World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
Europe.