‘A threatening din and clamour’: cultural dissonance in the Lake District’s harmonious landscape

Ferguson, Paul ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1789-6395 (2023) ‘A threatening din and clamour’: cultural dissonance in the Lake District’s harmonious landscape. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 27 (2). pp. 176-190.

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Abstract

The Lake District’s inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2017 foregrounded the harmonious relationship between culture and nature in the cultural landscape. Looking at the Lakes from a perspective that problematises both harmony (for Prynne a ‘function of money’), and culture (for E.P. Thompson ‘a whole way of conflict’), this article considers the landscape in the contexts of farming, tourism, economic growth and finally COVID-19. I argue that visitor activity following the easing of lockdown restrictions in 2020 and 2021 can be understood as offering a challenge to the dominant narrative of harmony underpinning the region with an uncomfortable apocalyptic revelation of a consumer culture that tourist destinations such as the Lakes more often work to conceal.

Item Type:	Article
Journal / Publication Title:	Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	2168-1414
Departments:	Institute of Arts > Humanities Centre for National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA)
Additional Information:	This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	04 Jul 2023 13:47
Last Modified:	15 Oct 2024 12:21
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/7205

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