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Ruritanian romance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Ruritanian Romance is a story set in an imaginary Middle European or East European country, such as the Ruritania that gave the genre its name, in a time contemporary to the author.
The popularity of the Graustark novels led to this genre also being called Graustarkian Romances.
Such stories are typically swashbuckling tales of high romance, featuring adventure, romance, and intrigue, centered on the upper classes. The themes of honor, loyalty, and love predominate, and the books frequently feature the restoration of kings to the throne.
Although recognizable Ruritanian Romances (such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Prince Otto) were written prior to Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, it set the type, with its adventure of restoring the rightful king to the throne, and resulted in a period of similar popular fiction: George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark novels, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Lost Prince, Andre Norton's The Prince Commands.
The genre was widely spoofed and parodied, as well. George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man parodied many elements. Dorothy Sayers's Have His Carcase 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's Pale Fire, the main narrator has the delusion of being the incognito king of a "distant northern land" who romantically escaped a Soviet-backed revolution.[1]
The popularity of the genre declined after the first part of the twentieth century. Beside the usual effect of fashion, the royalist elements of Ruritanian Romances became less plausible as many European kings receded even from memory to become part of history, and monarchical restorations grew less likely.
The genre was later spoofed in both the film and novel of The Princess Bride with the fake European countries of Guilder and Florin.
Many elements of the genre have been transplanted into fantasy worlds, particularly those of fantasy of manners and alternate history. These stories are sometimes still referred to as Graustarkian or Ruritanian.
- ^ McCarthy, Mary (June 4, 1962). "A Bolt from the Blue". The New Republic. Revised version in Mary McCarthy (2002). A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays. New York: The New York Review of Books, pp. 83–102. ISBN 1-59017-010-5. Retrieved on 2006-09-25.