Ruritania

This is a book about the long cultural shadow cast by a single bestselling novel, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), which introduced Ruritania, a colourful pocket kingdom. In this swashbuckling tale, Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll impersonates the king of Ruritania to foil a coup, but faces a dilemma when he falls for the lovely Princess Flavia. Hope's novel inspired stage and screen adaptations, place names, and even a board game, but it also launched a whole new subgenre, the "Ruritanian romance". The new form offered swordplay, royal romance, and splendid uniforms and gowns in such settings as Alasia, Balaria, and Cadonia. This study explores both the original appeal of The Prisoner of Zenda, and the extraordinary longevity and adaptability of the Ruritanian formula, which, it is argued, has been rooted in a lingering fascination with royalty, and the pocket kingdom's capacity to hold a looking glass up to Britain and later the United States. Individual chapters look at Hope's novel and its stage and film adaptations; at the forgotten American versions of Ruritania; at the chocolate-box principalities of the musical stage; at Cold War reworkings of the formula; and at Ruritania's recent reappearance in young adult fiction and made-for-television Christmas movies. The adventures of Ruritania have involved a diverse list of contributors, including John Buchan, P.G Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ian Fleming among the writers; Sigmund Romberg and Ivor Novello among the composers; Erich Von Stroheim and David O. Selznick among the film-makers; and Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Peter Ustinov, Peter Sellers, and Anne Hathaway among the performers.

Do the job, collect the fee, and don’t look in the envelope. Rory Redman’s exploits might drive his contemporaries to rage and himself to insolvency, but he has never put anyone in real danger – before now. His desperation for money drives him to accept a commission that he knows has crossed a line. All he has to do is keep a lid on his curiosity and his troubles are behind him. But Rory Redman was never one to deny an impulse. There is a heart-stopping inevitability about the way his choices funnel him ever further from safety and ever further from home. The mutual attraction between him and Ariadne Sowerby might be the route to salvation except that both strive to hide their feelings and Rory’s suicidal curiosity focuses on Klarissa Alterleta, the strange woman whose antics escalated his minor troubles into the stratosphere. In Ruritania, a country that roams Europe like a restless wanderer, a national crisis is brewing. Cut-throat revolutionaries, national security forces and Britain’s secret service are all involved, and are all overtly or covertly at each other’s throats. But they share a lone goal – each is determined to find Rory Redman and wipe him from the face of the earth. Ariadne might have helped him if he hadn’t alienated her. Klarissa could save him from the worst of his pursuers, but she won’t. Forced back on to his own inner strength, Rory girds his loins and faces the fact that his only real expertise lies in logic, marathon running and Morris dancing. The contest is surely lost before it has begun.

British fictions of the early twentieth century appear obsessed with Europe. Various texts from E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence to Bram Stoker and the period's travel writing explore European spaces, constructing the European as an Other threatening the position of the English. What they constantly repeat is England's difference and the secondary role of European spaces, whose representation resembles that of colonial lands. By reading selected texts, both canonized and popular, published between 1894 and 1916, this study argues that this xenophobic construction is a sign of the pervading presence of concerns related to the maintenance of English national identity, Englishness, allegedly threatened by the European Other. By drawing on current postcolonial theory, the case studies in the volume show that the discourse on the Other produced in British writings on Europe contributes more than has been understood to the making and promoting of Englishness. The authors studied include D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Anthony Hope, Arnold Bennett, Mrs Alec Tweedie, Erskine Childers, and Joseph Conrad. The study will renew our understanding of the role of Europe in the period's cultural imagination, showing that the identities of the English are formed in encounters with different internal and external Others.

Yoram Dinstein's influential War, Aggression and Self-Defence is an indispensable guide to the international legal issues of war and peace.

Proposes an alternative methodology for determining causation in WTO law by drawing on causal philosophy and econometric analysis.

This textbook--an abridged version of Radford's Minimalist Syntax and the Syntax of English--provides a concise and accessible introduction to current syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Programme. Assuming little or no prior grammatical knowledge, it takes students through a range of topics in English syntax, beginning at an elementary level and progressing in stages towards more advanced material. There is an extensive glossary, and each chapter contains a workbook section with 'helpful hints', exercises and model answers, suitable for both class discussion and self-study.