Ruritanian romance

Ruritanian romance is a genre of literature, film and theatre comprising novels, stories, plays and films set in a fictional country, usually in Central or Eastern Europe, such as the "Ruritania" that gave the genre its name.

Such stories are typically swashbuckling adventure novels, tales of high romance and intrigue, centered on the ruling classes, almost always aristocracy and royalty, although (for instance) Winston Churchill's novel Savrola, in every other way a typical example of the genre, concerns a revolution to restore rightful parliamentary government in the republican country of Laurania. The themes of honor, loyalty and love predominate, and the works frequently feature the restoration of legitimate government after a period of usurpation or dictatorship.

Romantic stories about the royalty of a fictional kingdom were common in fiction, for instance Robert Louis Stevenson's Prince Otto (1885). But it was the great popularity of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) which set the type, with its handsome political decoy restoring the rightful king to the throne, and resulted in a burst of similar popular fiction, such as George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark novels (1901–27) and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Lost Prince (1915), and other homages. Another example is The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) by Eric Ambler (titled A Coffin for Dimitrios in the US), which was made into a 1944 film version.

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