[PDF] Ruritania eBook

Author : Nicholas Daly
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 38,5 MB
Release : 2020-01-15
Category :
ISBN : 0198836600

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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.

Author : Nicholas Daly
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 42,51 MB
Release : 2020-01-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0192573675

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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.

Author : Anthony Hope
Publisher : e-artnow
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 34,79 MB
Release : 2019-12-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN :

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Queen Flavia, dutifully but unhappily married to her cousin Rudolf V, writes to her true love Rudolf Rassendyll. The letter is carried by von Tarlenheim and his servant Bauer to be delivered by hand, but Fritz is betrayed by Bauer and it is stolen by the exiled Rupert of Hentzau and his loyal cousin the Count of Luzau-Rischenheim. Hentzau sees in it a chance to return to favor by informing the pathologically jealous and paranoid King.

Author : Mark P Henderson
Publisher : Fantastic Books Publishing
Page : 359 pages
File Size : 34,12 MB
Release :
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1912053837

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Do the job, collect the fee, and don’t look in the envelope. Rory Redman’s exploits might drive his contemporaries to rage and himself to insolvency, but he has never put anyone in real danger – before now. His desperation for money drives him to accept a commission that he knows has crossed a line. All he has to do is keep a lid on his curiosity and his troubles are behind him. But Rory Redman was never one to deny an impulse. There is a heart-stopping inevitability about the way his choices funnel him ever further from safety and ever further from home. The mutual attraction between him and Ariadne Sowerby might be the route to salvation except that both strive to hide their feelings and Rory’s suicidal curiosity focuses on Klarissa Alterleta, the strange woman whose antics escalated his minor troubles into the stratosphere. In Ruritania, a country that roams Europe like a restless wanderer, a national crisis is brewing. Cut-throat revolutionaries, national security forces and Britain’s secret service are all involved, and are all overtly or covertly at each other’s throats. But they share a lone goal – each is determined to find Rory Redman and wipe him from the face of the earth. Ariadne might have helped him if he hadn’t alienated her. Klarissa could save him from the worst of his pursuers, but she won’t. Forced back on to his own inner strength, Rory girds his loins and faces the fact that his only real expertise lies in logic, marathon running and Morris dancing. The contest is surely lost before it has begun.

Author : Vesna Goldsworthy
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 16,20 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Balkan Peninsula
ISBN : 9780231704236

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Published more than a decade ago, Inventing Ruritania has become a standard study of the West's attitude toward the Balkans -- the "Wild East" of Europe. With its Western and Oriental influences, the Balkans have both attracted and repelled outsiders, offering a tantalizing alternative to familiar society. Completely different from "us" yet exactly what "we" used to be, the Balkans have particularly provided Western European and American writers and filmmakers with a wealth of images, characters, and ideas. In her prodigiously researched volume, Vesna Goldsworthy explores the entertainment industry's lucrative exploitation of Balkan history and geography and its affect on Western conceptions of the region. She traces the national, religious, and sexual fears foreign observers project onto Balkan lands and the use of Balkan archetypes. The work of an Anglo-Serbian writer and former BBC journalist turned academic, Inventing Ruritania maps an imaginary geography that has had palpable consequences in the practical world.

Author : Anthony Hope
Publisher : Independently Published
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 45,92 MB
Release : 2021-02-11
Category :
ISBN :

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The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), by Anthony Hope, is an adventure novel in which the King of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus is unable to attend the ceremony. Political forces within the realm are such that, in order for the king to retain the crown, his coronation must proceed. Fortuitously, an English gentleman on holiday in Ruritania who resembles the monarch is persuaded to act as his political decoy in an effort to save the unstable political situation of the interregnum.

Author : Richard Rottenburg
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 32,37 MB
Release : 2009-04-17
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0262264447

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A fictionalized ethnographic study of development aid in sub-Saharan Africa that focuses on technologies of inscription in the interactions of development banks, international experts, and local managers. In 1996, the sub-Saharan African country of Ruritania launched a massive waterworks improvement project, funded by the Normesian Development Bank, headquartered in Urbania, Normland, and with the guidance of Shilling & Partner, a consulting firm in Mercatoria, Normland. Far-Fetched Facts tells the story of this project, as narrated by anthropologists Edward B. Drotlevski and Samuel A. Martonosi. Their account of the Ruritanian waterworks project views the problems of development from a new perspective, focusing on technologies of inscription in the interactions of development bank, international experts, and local managers. This development project is fictionalized, of course, although based closely on author Richard Rottenburg's experiences working on and observing different development projects in the 1990s. Rottenburg uses the case of the Ruritanian waterworks project to examine issues of standardization, database building, documentation, calculation, and territory mapping. The techniques and technologies of the representational practices of documentation are crucial, Rottenburg argues, both to day-to-day management of the project and to the demonstration of the project's legitimacy. Five decades of development aid (or “development cooperation,” as it is now sometimes known) have yielded disappointing results. Rottenburg looks in particular at the role of the development consultant (often called upon to act as mediator between the other actors) and at the interstitial spaces where developmental cooperation actually occurs. He argues that both critics and practitioners of development often misconstrue the grounds of cooperation—which, he claims, are moral, legal, and political rather than techno-scientific or epistemological.

Author : Kj Charles
Publisher :
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 42,40 MB
Release : 2018-05-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781912688005

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Jasper Detchard is a disgraced British officer, now selling his blade to the highest bidder. Currently that's Michael Elphberg, half-brother to the King of Ruritania. Michael wants the throne for himself, and Jasper is one of the scoundrels he hires to help him take it. But when Michael makes his move, things don't go entirely to plan-and the penalty for treason is death. Rupert of Hentzau is Michael's newest addition to his sinister band of henchmen. Charming, lethal, and intolerably handsome, Rupert is out for his own ends-which seem to include getting Jasper into bed. But Jasper needs to work out what Rupert's really up to amid a maelstrom of plots, swordfights, scheming, impersonation, desire, betrayal, and murder. Nobody can be trusted. Everyone has a secret. And love is the worst mistake you can make. A retelling of the swashbuckling classic The Prisoner of Zenda from a very different point of view.