Ruritania is a fictional kingdom in Central Europe which forms the setting for three novels by the writer Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), The Heart of Princess Osra (1896), and Rupert of Hentzau (1898). The kingdom is also the setting for sequels and variations by other writers, including Simon Hawke's science-fiction re-working The Zenda Vendetta (Time Wars Book 4) (1985), and John Spurling's humorous post-Cold War thriller After Zenda (1995).

In Hope's oeuvre, Ruritania is depicted as a German-speaking, Roman Catholic country under an absolute monarchy, with deep social divisions reflected in the conflicts of the first novel. Geographically, it is located between Saxony and Bohemia—the author indicates that the capital city, Strelsau, lies on the railway line between Dresden and Prague. Hope's novels give the impression that Ruritania would not be a pleasant place to inhabit, with its feckless, autocratic king, police surveillance of suspected subversives, and society deeply polarised between rich and poor. However, stage and film versions sanitised and romanticised the setting, ignoring Hope's references to the poverty and political unrest in Strelsau's Old City, and depicted instead a picturesque fairy-tale kingdom. Among the later novelists to use this setting, neither Hawke nor Spurling adheres to the Hope canon; their works show influences from the film adaptations. Hawke relocates Ruritania to the Balkans, and makes it smaller and more socially cohesive; Spurling introduces ethnic/linguistic divisions.

Hope's novels resulted in "Ruritania" becoming a generic term for any imaginary kingdom used as the setting for romance, intrigue and adventure. In Evelyn Waugh's 1930 comedic novel Vile Bodies, one character is a deposed and maudlin "ex-King of Ruritania." It lent its name to a whole genre of writing, the Ruritanian Romance, including the Graustark novels by George Barr McCutcheon.

"Ruritania" is also the name of a hypothetical country used by members of the Austrian School of economics to teach economic concepts. Some well known economists who have adopted this tradition are Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt and Walter Block.

Ruritania has also been used to describe the stereotypical development of nationalism in 19th century Eastern Europe, by Ernest Gellner in Nations and Nationalism, in a pastiche of the historical narratives of nationalist movements among Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Romanians, etc. In this story, peasant Ruritanians living in the "Empire of Megalomania" developed national consciousness through the elaboration of a Ruritanian "high culture" by a small group of Ruritanian intellectuals in response to industrialization and labor migration.

Jurists specialising in International Law also freqently use the name Ruritania (as well as other names of imaginary states from literature) when describing a hypothetical case illustrating some legal point.

Ruritania also inspired many later fictional countries such as Ixania in Eric Ambler's The Dark Frontier which share with the original the depiction of complex power struggles in the fictional country in which a visiting protagnist from a real country becomes deeply involved.

Other uses

Ruritania is also a Jugendstil fraktur typeface, by Australian designer Paul J. Lloyd.

Fictional countries

רוריטניה