Although notoriously imprecise designations dating from the nineteenth century, ‘the Balkans’ and ‘Ruritania’ have played surprisingly prominent roles in configurations of identity in modern British literature and culture. Building on existing research into cultural representations, this chapter seeks to provide a survey of British engagement with the region, real or imagined, from early modern to recent times. Drawing on a range of examples and taking into account travel accounts and historiographical texts as well as fiction, cinema, and theatre, it argues that representation of these purported regions straddled fact and fiction, as well as high and popular culture. British images of the Balkans and/or Ruritania reflected both shifts in literary currents and modes, and changes in Britain’s relationship to Europe and the world as a whole.

Drawing on archival material, interviews with editors and collaborators, and available publication history, this essay will situate Wallace’s writing within the publishing environment of his lifetime. The essay will be structured in three sections. The first will survey the material contexts of Wallace’s published output, tracing how his work entered the literary marketplace as well as the changes in that marketplace during the consolidation of what has been called the “Conglomerate Era” of US publishing. The second will consider the ways in which the author integrated these changes into his own writing – from his anxieties about the threats to literary culture from television in the 1980s, his development of these fears in the spectacle of weaponized entertainment within Infinite Jest, to his sustained act of Information Age media archaeology in The Pale King in response to the corporate-dominated “Total Noise” of the twenty-first century. The final section will survey Wallace’s posthumous publications, considering the ways in which his legacy is continued and contested in publications across physical and digital media.

The preface describes the research methodology and the writing process that led to this book. It begins by explaining how the author collected information from the relevant sources, verified its completeness and accuracy, and analysed it under a unified framework. It then turns to the issue of storytelling style and to the author’s decision to present his findings in the form of a fictionalized account. In so doing, the preface discusses the problem of verifiability of classified information, the issue of trust between the narrator and the audience, and the promises and pitfalls of literary writing when it comes to informing, reporting, or commenting on real life.