ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses both the topics of cultural consumption and national and regional identity by focusing on the creation and consumption of culture in the North-East of England between 1660 and 1830. It highlights how the shifting boundaries and definitions of 'North-East' in themselves present new challenges to our modes of thinking about what constitutes regional identity, past and present. The book explores how far identity was bound up with cultural consumption, but also wanted to ask how far the culture created and consumed in the North-East exhibited what might be called "national' or 'regional' trends, tropes and themes. The model put forward by Neil McKendrick has encouraged historians to examine the new world of goods, and indeed it has been argued that the most distinctive contribution of the eighteenth century to culture was the invention of the novel.
