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The Caucasian spa resort is a significant setting in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. This paper will trace the origins and evolution of Russian fictional writing about watering places like Piatigorsk and Kislovodsk from romanticism until the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time it will consider the semiotic theories of Iurii Lotman’s Tartu-Moscow School and the ‘transtextual’ apparatus of the French narratologist Gérard Genette as ‘toolboxes’ for work on place in narrative.

This paper proposes that the forgotten Earl's Court Spanish Exhibition of 1889 provides a valuable window onto the complex relationship between the British and Spanish Empires at the moment of one's expansion and the other's fragmentation. Part I assesses the limited archival evidence together with media reports from both Spain and Britain to uncover the Exhibition’s origins in London’s Spanish expatriate business community and its takeover by British businessmen with interests in Latin America. Part II reconstructs the Exhibition’s layout and contents in order to explore how the contrasting geocultural logics of Spain’s renewed self-projection as a modern Empire and the longstanding British obsession with Spain’s Islamic past play out in the exhibitionary space and its contents. Part III analyses the rhetorical and imaginative strategies employed in British press coverage of the Exhibition, to argue that their coded representations of Spain and Spanish culture open the door to understanding the Exhibition in the context of Spain’s partial absorption into Britain’s nineteenth-century ‘informal empire.’