Cumbrians and their "ancient kingdom": landscape, literature and regional identity

In recent accounts of the way in which a sense of place is developed and constituted there is an acknowledgement of the underlying connections between human inhabitants and the physical external signifiers of place. Such connections are reinforced, processed and developed through a variety of mechanisms, and one crucial forum in which this processing occurs is literature. Attention to the ways in which regional identity is constructed within literary texts offers us important insights into how the complex connections between a particular place and its inhabitants are negotiated, and how through this a regional identity comes to be developed. Cumbrian literature offers a particularly interesting example of this sort of negotiation since, from a very early stage, texts written about Cumbria have tended to focus on the physical drama of its natural landscape, and this has led to a related interest within this body of work as to the impact of this wild and untamed environment on its human inhabitants.