MLR, 105.3, 2010 815 The matters which preoccupied public-spirited citizens in Liverpool?toleration, democratic reform, slavery,war?were also those which animated debate in the metropolitan centres of Europe. Moreover, what was said and done at the peri phery was evidently much more than a pale or blurred reflection of the core. This is a conclusion drawn, or at least hinted at, by several of the contributors to this informative collection, and it is surely an important one. For it isby examining the Enlightenment at themargins?from the outside in, so to speak?that itsachieve ments and its shortcomings can often best be judged. Swansea University Hugh Dunthorne Antithetical Arts: On theAncient Quarrel between Literature andMusic. By Peter Kivy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2009. ix+275 pp. ?27.50. ISBN 978-0-19 956280-0. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination. By Harry White. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. xiv+260 pp. ?55. ISBN 978-0-19-954732-6. As the title of Peter Kivy's latest book indicates, the increasingly common inter disciplinary project to yoke together musical and literary studies?a project that Harry White's Music and the Irish Literary Imagination carries forward?still has its detractors. While Kivy describes the relation between music and literature as fundamentally antithetical, White discusses specific instances inwhich the two arts might be thought of as apposite' (p. 25), or even 'synonymous' (p. viii). It would seem that these two viewpoints could never find common cause, but in their separate ways, both authors helpfully refine and delimit current approaches tomusico-literary criticism: one by negation and the other by example. Kivy's Antithetical Arts ismore precisely focused than its subtitle implies: by an cient' he means from the late eighteenth century onwards, by Titerature> he usually means realistic fictionor drama, and by 'music' hemeans absolute music?or touse his phrase, 'music alone'. Readers ofKivy's previous work will recall the title of his 1990 book, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on thePurelyMusical Experience (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press), and recognize that, inmany respects, he is not treading new ground here. But in the interim, themethods of the 'newmusicology' have taken a firmhold in the academy, and narrative inter pretations of absolute music have proliferated. Antithetical Arts constitutes Kivy's latest (and perhaps, he hints, his last) attempt to defend formalism against those who would import extra-musical meaning intopurely musical works. It is essential reading for anyone on either side of the debate. The book consists of three sections: 'The Founding of Formalism', 'The Fortunes of Formalism', and 'The Fate of Formalism'. In his preface Kivy permits the reader to skip Part 1,but I found the historical background instructive. Chapter 1, inpar ticular, provides a fascinating explanation of how literary and dramatic readings of absolute music arose in the firstplace. Early interpreters,Kivy argues, approached the fairly recent artistic phenomenon of absolute music in the only way theyknew 8i6 Reviews how: as operas whose librettos needed to be supplied by the imaginations of listen ers. Chapters 2 and 3,which deal with the evolution ofmusical formalism in the work of Kant and in Eduard Hanslick's ground-breaking 1854 book, Of Musical Beauty, are perhaps more drily intellectual, but Kivy's lively tone never makes for dull reading. The author himself describes his chapter on Kant as laborious' and pedantic' (p. 49), but Iwould lay the blame for this at Kant's door rather than Kivys. Part 11presents the author at his most combative. Recent narrativist inter pretations of works from the absolute music canon are paraphrased and then systematically (often devastatingly) dismantled. One admires the logical precision Kivy demonstrates throughout this virtuoso performance, though occasionally the plight of those under attack arouses sympathy. The work of fellow philosopher JeneferRobinson seems to be singled out?both her recent book Deeper than Reason: Emotion and itsRole in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) and the collection she edited in 1997,Music andMeaning (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press). While I never doubted the philosophical accuracy of Kivys conclusions (p. 163), I do wonder whether the antagonists in this debate are speaking at cross purposes: thevery titleofRobinson...