Ruritania made its debut in Hope’s fast-paced bestseller of 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda, which creates a blueprint for dozens of similar narratives. The location of this semi-feudal territory is always a little vague, shifting from Germany in the 1890s, to the Balkans in the early-twentieth century, to the French Alps in the 1950s. The imaginary setting of Ruritania takes shape in the late–nineteenth-century imagination as a realm of romance and swashbuckling, a space for old-fashioned adventure in a modernizing world. Since the 1890s, Ruritanian backdrops have been reworked for a variety of purposes, from Balkan spy novels, to interwar operetta, to Cold War satires, in such fictional territories as Ixania, Krasnia, and Grand Fenwick. English and later American protagonists stumble into plot-driven narratives that usually feature some combination of schemes against the throne, doubles or mistaken identities, swordplay, and love at first sight. Anthony Hope’s bestseller of 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda, inspired a subgenre of adventure romances set in imaginary, semi-feudal European countries, of which Ruritania is the original.
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