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Ruritania is a fictional kingdom in Central Europe which forms the setting for three novels by the writer Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), The Heart of Princess Osra (1896), and Rupert of Hentzau (1898). The kingdom is also the setting for sequels and variations by other writers, including Simon Hawke's science-fiction re-working The Zenda Vendetta (Time Wars Book 4) (1985), John Haythorne's Communist-era The Streslau Dimension,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 usually considered to be 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, who places the country in the Carpathians, introduces ethnic/linguistic divisions; Haythorne puts Ruritania on the other side of Czechoslovakia to Spurling.

Hope's novels resulted in "Ruritania" becoming a generic term for any imaginary small, European 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"; he is presumably the same figure who appears in several P.G. Wodehouse stories, mostly as the doorman of Barribault's Hotel. 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. Walter Lippmann used the word to describe the stereotype that characterized the vision of international relations during and after the First World War.

Ruritania has also been used to describe the stereotypical development of nationalism in 19th century Eastern Europe, by Ernest Gellner in Nations and Nationalism, in a pastiche of the historical narratives of nationalist movements among Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Romanians, etc. In this story, peasant Ruritanians living in the "Empire of Megalomania" developed national consciousness through the elaboration of a Ruritanian "high culture" by a small group of Ruritanian intellectuals in response to industrialization and labor migration.

Jurists specialising in International Law also frequently use the name Ruritania (as well as other names of imaginary states from literature) when describing a hypothetical case illustrating some legal point.

Ruritania also inspired many later fictional countries such as Ixania in Eric Ambler's The Dark Frontier which share with the original the depiction of complex power struggles in the fictional country in which a visiting protagonist from a real country becomes deeply involved.

Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer cited Ruritania as a fictional enemy when illustrating a security treaty between Australia and Indonesia signed on 8 November 2006: "We do not need to have a security agreement with Indonesia so both of us will fight off the Ruritanians. That's not what the relationship is about," he said. "It is all about working together on the threats that we have to deal with, which are different types of threats".

Ruritania is also the name of a highly nationalist country in Equitorial Cyberspace, a fictional continent used for a peacebuilding and conflict resolution simulation at McGill University.

Biochemistry professor, science and science fiction writer, and humor theorist Isaac Asimov, when telling ethnic jokes that were based entirely on ethnic slurs, would transplant them to Ruritania, e.g.

Q: Why do Ruritanian dogs have flat faces?

A: From chasing parked cars.

Ruritania is also a Jugendstil fraktur typeface, by Australian designer Paul J. Lloyd.