Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination [Hardcover]

Vesna Goldsworthy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 1998

Since the 1800s, the Balkans - the "Wild East" of Europe - have offered material for the literature and the entertainment industries in Western Europe and America. In this process of imaginative colonization, products developed in the West - lands such as Bram Stoker's Transylvania (in "Dracula") and Anthony Hope's Ruritania (in "The Prisoner of Zenda") - became lucrative brand-names which remain much better known than their real counterparts. Vesna Goldsworthy's study argues that the imperialism of the imagination inflicted on the Balkans has had insidious but little-recognized consequences. Religion, national and sexual taboos, frequently projected on to the region, still influence Western attitudes and political responses. Goldsworthy delineates the cultural background to Western engagement in the Balkans, from Byron to the war correpsondents of the 1990s, by bringing together poetry and fiction - including popular and comic genres and the films they inspired - by authors ranging from Shelley and Tennyson to G.B. Shaw, E.M. Forster (whose homoerotic play "The Heart of Bosnia" to date has never been performed or published), Grahame Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Lawrence Durrell. Explaining why many of the most influential works inspired by the Balkans were written by women, she reveals details about writers such as Olivia Manning and Rebecca West. Based on Western and Eastern European sources, letters, dairies, personal interviews and the author's own experience of the Balkans, this often amusing work offers an analysis of social and political exploitation, and of the media use of archetypes created by literature and film.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This scholarly study examines how 19th-century writers and later filmmakers have helped to shape Western perception of the Balkans. Goldsworthy (English, Birkbeck Coll.) presents writers from Bram Stoker (Dracula) and Anthony Hope (Ruritania) to Graham Greene, Lord Byron, and George Bernard Shaw, to name a few. Goldsworthy shows how an identifiable Balkan identity emerged from these writers that has held sway over the past century. The result is what she calls a "narrative colonization" of the BalkansAthat is, its literary exploitation, which has resulted in its continued misrepresentation. While her thesis is interesting, it seems to follow the current trend toward politicizing literary studies, making her work of interest mainly to academic collections.ARon Ratliff, Chapman H.S. Lib., KS
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post

Inventing Ruritania is a sober, thoughtful and perceptive examination of an entertainment industry, but some of us must guiltily admit that ... we rejoice in revisiting Graustark, Ruritania and Kravonia. They are false, but how nice it would be if they were true.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 254 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (June 16, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300073127
• ISBN-13: 978-0300073126
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,545,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but incomplete, September 8, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Hardcover)

An interesting but hardly exhaustive study of a fascinating subject. The major flaw here is that the author overlooks (deliberately?) works that do not agree with her theory, namely that the West (particularly England) invented a literary "Wild East" to demonize, "infantilize" or ridicule the perceived alien threat of the Balkans.

One example is when the author discusses the utterly obscure KATTIE OF THE BALKANS by forgotten author F. O. H. Nash while ignoring the still in-print THE LOST PRINCE by well-known author of THE SECRET GARDEN and A LITTLE PRINCESS, Frances Hodgson Burnett. But KATTIE fits the author's theory while THE LOST PRINCE, with it's strong, self-reliant Balkan heroes, does not.

Also, do not expect an indepth examination of films in this genre, as the cover illustration seems to promise. There is only the barest mention of THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL and the play it was based on, THE SLEEPING PRINCE, and no mention at all of other similarly themed films such as THE SWAN, ROMAN HOLIDAY and THE STUDENT PRINCE.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unsatisfactory at its best, completely biased at its worst!, September 20, 2009

By 

Alexis Ball (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Hardcover)

For a book that promises to give a certain degree of truth on the never-ending Balkan question this work fails miserably. The writer, who is (apparently) of serbo-croatian origin fails on many occasions to give true facts. To mention a few, in speaking about Byron toward the beginning of the book she states that he is now most remembered for his picture in his "Balkan" dress, when I'm sure she means "ALBANIAN" dress; in discussing her accounts of the two Balkan travel-writers Edith Durham and Rebecca West, the author is clearly being biased toward the later whose own sympathises were Yugoslavian. The author states in one particular sentence which struck as especially curious. She states: "...the recognition of a shared past which inspired Durham's lines might conceivably be compared to West's, even if Durham never paused longer than this to consider her own feelings about the Balkans. Any such attempt would have contradicted her endevour to be 'objective' and 'scholarly' in her descriptions. For West, the emotions are the introspection are as important as the act of travelling--they are, in fact, the essence of her journey." (181) One can undoubtedly recognize that West's sympathies for Yugoslavian/Serbian nation are being returned in kind by the author in this work. Perhaps Durham's increasing distaste for the Serbians, which she later came to coin as the "serb-varmint", have influenced the author's (of serb-croation origin) judgment on properly comparing the works of these two women in their proper light. Another instance of complete biased is at the beginning of this chpater when the author gives a background of both writers, and while mentioning (and undermining) the importance of Durham's works, she does not hold back from praising West's work.

In conclusion, this work fails what it completely sets out to do. It promises to give a better view of the Balkans, but what it truly means is to give a better view of the Yugoslavia--be it Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro etc. I cannot claim to be much surprised that a Balkanese is unable to give an objective of the Balkans, because in the words of Edith Durham herself (and included in this work, pg 170) the Balkan people are: "like cats and dogs," and thus, to ask for an objective view of its history, from one of its children, is apparently asking too much!