Western Views
For urban European readers in the 19th century, Ruthenia was one origin of the 19th century's imaginary "Ruritania" the most rural, most rustic and deeply provincial tiny province lost in forested mountains that could be imagined. Conceived sometimes as a kingdom of central Europe, Ruritania was the setting of several novels by Anthony Hope, especially The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).
Recently Vesna Goldsworthy, in Inventing Ruritania: the imperialism of the imagination (1998) has explored the origins of the ideas that underpin Western perceptions of the "Wild East" of Europe, especially of Ruthenian and other rural Slavs in the upper Balkans, but ideas that are highly applicable to Transcarpathia, all in all "an innocent process: a cultural great power seizes and exploits the resources of an area, while imposing new frontiers on its mind-map and creating ideas which, reflected back, have the ability to reshape reality."
Read more about this topic: Carpathian Ruthenia
Famous quotes containing the words western and/or views:
“It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Your views are now my own.”
—Marvin Cohen, U.S. author and humorist.
In conversation, after having taken a strong position in an argument and heard a complete refutation of his position.