Merrett, Robert James. <i>Imperial Paradoxes: Training the Senses and Tasting the Eighteenth Century</i>

Imperial Paradoxes seeks to immerse the reader in the sensory experience of the Anglo-French eighteenth century. Via a range of close analyses and literary-historical surveys, Merrett explores intertwined significations of empire and culture through authors’ adoption of imperial language and responses to travel, fashion, and gustatory consumption. Merrett’s canvas is wide and his aims ambitious. Across nearly four hundred pages, the study takes in a panoply of writers and thinkers, including Shaftesbury, Addison, Swift, Johnson, Sterne, Smollett, Frances Brooke, Austen, and numerous playwrights. At the heart of the project lies an attempt to unpick the complex intersection of empire and aesthetics within the period’s literature, with a particular focus on the entangled cultural relationship between England and France. The result is a discussion abundant in detail and interest, albeit one that wavers at times between learned and insightful readings and less clearly pertinent matter.The opening chapters present various conceptual and methodological foundations for the study. Merrett’s range of topics and approaches is evident from the outset: even the Acknowledgments register the book’s concerns with the constitution of literary history, cultural materialism, cognitive science (“embodied consciousness”), the creative imagination, aesthetic pleasure, the history of Anglo-French relations, and developing notions of imperial power. At the same time, Merrett wishes to innovate methods. Rather than moving chronologically, the approach here will be “cyclical, encyclopedic, and cross-cultural.” Resisting literary history that is hedged in by “geographical, linguistic, and national boundaries,” Merrett calls for attention to be paid instead to international relationships and mutual influences. This is a substantial but potentially unwieldy set of aims and concerns, and at times Imperial Paradoxes bursts at the seams of this framework. The title itself is to some degree misleading: readers expecting an account of ideological fissures within the formation of global imperialism might well find themselves bemused. “Empire” here is as much figurative as factual, its “paradoxes” less those of empire itself than of shifting imperial metaphors and cultural strategies. As Merrett puts it: “In critiquing British imperialism for entailing consumerism, commerce, and capitalism, not a few authors realized it might be transmuted into a metaphor refining sense perception and aesthetic appreciation.” This transmutation is the particular focus of chapter 1, which offers an extensive survey of the aestheticization of “empire” while sometimes veering uneasily between the various meanings and resonances of “taste.”The early chapters also articulate the study’s further aim with regard to the teaching of literary history. Discussing Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste (1825), Merrett indicates his own opposition to elitist and “compartmentalized” literary criticism and claims that retrieving the “imperial imagery” of Brillat-Savarin’s work can help us to “reconceive pedagogy.” If it remains unclear precisely how this early nineteenth-century discussion of the senses and empire might rejuvenate modern teaching practices, chapter 2 elaborates more fully on this ambition. Here Merrett addresses Addison and literariness in order to assess “how eighteenth-century texts may be made more accessible to readers through its contexts of food, drink, fashion, and travel,” so as “to re-motivate the teaching of eighteenth-century literature.” In essence, Merrett wishes us to discard transcendent notions of literature and ground eighteenth-century writing, and our teaching of it, in this writing’s own experiential world and truth claims. Yet the discussion that follows, which engages with cognitive science, culture wars, and the crisis in the humanities, is not well connected to the rest of the study; it is here that the book most betrays its origins in a series of lectures. While subsequent chapters do occasionally reiterate Merrett’s call for a renewal of literary history, this remains the least integral aspect of the project as a whole.The study’s actual strengths are best demonstrated by chapter 3, which comprises a masterful discussion of “Spirits and Wine in Imperial Canada, 1630–1900.” Paying close attention to rhetorical maneuverings and the vagaries of narrative, this chapter well supports Merrett’s claim that verbal texts are both complex and conflicted. Approaching spirits and wine in “semiotic terms . . . for historical signs of the physiology and philosophy of taste,” Merrett uncovers the varied significations of alcoholic consumption within different contexts: in private and public, at the frontiers, and within broader imperial rivalries. Among other things, the chapter carefully teases out complications within a later eighteenth-century attempt to categorize different native groups by reference to their consumption of European spirits (as Merrett also observes here, “the image of the drunken Indian” was itself “founded on commercial and colonial rivalry”). Within novels of the period, as the chapter also shows, the British sometimes align themselves with the French against the native population, sometimes distinguish themselves from the French. In works such as Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1767), for instance, imported (French) wine can “uphold British imperialism” while also being used to “demean Indians, habitants, and the French”—a process of semiotic differentiation and disparagement that, Merrett argues, ultimately recoils on the English. Overall, the chapter very successfully establishes how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors employed the semiotics of wine, and other positionings of alcoholic consumption and abstention, to navigate cultural identities and allegiances between Canada, France, and Britain.Comparatively, the study’s other chapters are less keenly focused, though rarely without interest. In chapter 1, “Aesthetic Empires,” some material relates mainly to empire, some to aesthetics. A short passage on The Dunciad notes suggestively how it “turned empire into an anti-myth” but says little specifically about taste, even if it does support the broader thesis that empire serves “diverse metaphorical functions.” A longer section on London and the theater, meanwhile, says little directly about either imperialism or aesthetics beyond detailing the topographical imaginary within comic drama performed in London, the metropolitan seat of empire. This chapter also displays the study’s broader tendency toward excessive illustration and quotation, as when Merrett transcribes in full a number of food recipes from Locke’s journals. Nevertheless, the chapter contains some fascinating discussions of often overlooked works, notably Johnson’s political writings on imperial outposts (e.g.: the Falkland Islands), and the human cost of war.The remaining chapters, which address cuisine, fashion, travel, and viticulture, are again rich in primary reference but sometimes lacking in secondary engagement: the coverage of Anglo-French relations and travel guides to France, in particular, fails to mention clearly relevant studies of British travelers and travel writing in the period and of both Francophilia and satiric representations of the French. Some of the primary texts examined also seem more germane than others. Revisiting the earlier section on Pope, further coverage of Scriblerian satire in chapter 4 mainly addresses food rather than empire. Yet if specifically “imperial” paradoxes threaten to fade from view here, the chapter is still interspersed with valuable sections of analysis, not least the concluding discussion of the “gastronomic codes” at play in Richard Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote (1773).Strangely, chapter 5 opens with further readings that more clearly combine empire and eating, as with the anti-imperialism and distorted “scales of ingestion” in Gulliver’s Travels. More broadly, this chapter foregrounds cross-cultural comparisons in travel narratives before presenting detailed accounts of the trade in British luxury goods in France and of cultural and commercial life in Bordeaux, underpinned by extensive research in the affiches. While such archival documentation is valuable and accords with Merrett’s call for more interdisciplinary approaches, this extended coverage of evidence from the affiches reads as different in kind to much of the rest of the study and sits oddly with the sometimes brief and intermittent treatment accorded key literary works, such as Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. The final chapter, on travel and wine, extends the study’s engagement with travel narratives. One of Merrett’s concerns here is to sift blinkered nationalistic accounts from more cosmopolitan or self-reflexive ones: John Andrews and Hester Lynch Piozzi are among those credited for their comparatively balanced approach. A late section on “wine and fashion in English literature” exemplifies once more the study’s merits and limitations. While this section is not clearly expressive of a larger thesis, it nevertheless constitutes a good reference point and overview for anyone interested in the representation of wine, and wine drinkers, in English drama of the long eighteenth century.Early on in Imperial Paradoxes, Merrett quotes from Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies”: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested.” Merrett’s own book, perhaps, is best chewed and digested in parts. Readers who attempt the full dish will nevertheless find much to savor on the topics of aesthetics, consumption, and Anglo-French cultural relations during the eighteenth century and beyond.

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