Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination - Hardcover

Goldsworthy, Vesna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300073127 ISBN 13: 9780300073126

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers and filmmakers in the West created a fictional Balkan land, a "Wild East" region of Europe. This pioneering book examines a wide range of Balkan-inspired imagery and shows how it has affected and still influences attitudes toward the countries of the region as well as the West`s political involvement there.

About this title

About the Author:

Vesna Goldsworthy is Professor in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University and the author of several widely translated and award-winning volumes. Following Inventing Ruritania, she published a best-selling memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries in 2005, which was serialized in The Times and read by Goldsworthy herself as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, and a Crashaw Prize winning poetry collection, The Angel of Salonika, one of The Times' Best Poetry Books of 2011.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0300073127
• ISBN 13: 9780300073126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254