In Imperial Paradoxes Robert Merrett compares British and French literature on those topics. He explains how food, wine, fashion, and tourism were channels of interdisciplinary relations and shows why authors in both nations turned the notion of empire from commercial and military expansion into a metaphor for exploring self-knowledge and pleasure. Although cognitive science has come to the fore only in the past two generations, eighteenth-century writers tested problems in the dualist and faculty psychology of Western rationalism. Themes of embodiment and embodied thought drawn from recent theorists are applied throughout this book, along with dialectics and models of the senses operating together.