Ruritania

A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries

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by Nicholas Daly

Type: Studies
Subject: On Films > Locations
Keywords: fantasy, adventures, locations
Publishing date: 2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 272 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-883660-5

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Book Presentation:
• An original survey of the many versions of the extraordinarily popular "Ruritanian romance" on both sides of the Atlantic
• Covers literary history, theatre history, film history, and history of the musical stage
• Written in a lively and accessible style and generously illustrated

This is a book about the long cultural shadow cast by a single bestselling novel, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), which introduced Ruritania, a colourful pocket kingdom. In this swashbuckling tale, Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll impersonates the king of Ruritania to foil a coup, but faces a dilemma when he falls for the lovely Princess Flavia. Hope's novel inspired stage and screen adaptations, place names, and even a board game, but it also launched a whole new subgenre, the "Ruritanian romance". The new form offered swordplay, royal romance, and splendid uniforms and gowns in such settings as Alasia, Balaria, and Cadonia.

This study explores both the original appeal of The Prisoner of Zenda, and the extraordinary longevity and adaptability of the Ruritanian formula, which, it is argued, has been rooted in a lingering fascination with royalty, and the pocket kingdom's capacity to hold a looking glass up to Britain and later the United States. Individual chapters look at Hope's novel and its stage and film adaptations; at the forgotten American versions of Ruritania; at the chocolate-box principalities of the musical stage; at Cold War reworkings of the formula; and at Ruritania's recent reappearance in young adult fiction and made-for-television Christmas movies. The adventures of Ruritania have involved a diverse list of contributors, including John Buchan, P.G Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ian Fleming among the writers; Sigmund Romberg and Ivor Novello among the composers; Erich Von Stroheim and David O. Selznick among the film-makers; and Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Peter Ustinov, Peter Sellers, and Anne Hathaway among the performers.

About the Author:
Nicholas Daly, Professor of Modern English and American Literature, University College Dublin Educated at University College Cork and Brown University, Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has also taught at Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, and Trinity College Dublin. His publications include Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (1999), Literature, Technology and Modernity (2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009), and The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (2015). He edited Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel for Oxford World's Classics, and he is completing a new edition of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda.

Press Reviews:
"insightful and entertaining ... Ruritania: A Cultural History shines as an academic study informed by detailed scholarship, sophisticated analysis and zestful prose." - Michael Dirda, Wall Street Journal

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press

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