Curated regions of the north: Art and literature in the ‘Scottish Border’ and the ‘Transpennine Corridor’

This article takes two regions separate in time and space: the Scottish Border in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the route across the Pennines between Lancashire and Yorkshire. I look at two instances – in literature and visual art – of how these otherwise disparate social and cultural geographies have been nominated as regions through hierarchies of curation. Comparing ballad publication in the earlier period and the 1998 Artranspennine exhibition, I show how the curated region is a model that responds to the heterogeneity of local places and artistic production, but is also underpinned by a more idealistic vision of human experience expressed as a Romance space.