Inventing Ruritania The Imperialism of the Imagination

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.