Silvia Caporale Bizzini, ed. 2003: We, the “Other Victorians”: Considering the Heritage of 19th-Century Thought. Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante. 215 pp. José Ángel García Landa Universidad de Zaragoza garciala@unizar.es While Victorianism used to connote all that is old-fashioned and residual, revisions of Victorianism from a distance make you more modern—although they come in various guises, such as conservative neo-Victorianism, postmodern rewritings of Victorian fiction, and retrospective exhibitions such as the one at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2001 (“The Victorian Vision: Inventing a New Britain”). With respect to the latter, Deborah Orr argued that “[i]n refusing to recognise so much of ourselves in the Victorians, we have failed to move on from their influence” (The Independent, qtd. by Tim Marshall on p. 71 of this volume). This is a major leitmotif in We, the “Other Victorians”: Considering the Heritage of 19th-Century Thought. The volume sets out to read a number of contemporary cultural phenomena through the distorting lens of their analogues or forerunners in the nineteenth century, and on the whole manages to do it quite admirably. In this sense, it will be of interest not just to cultural critics working on issues such as consumerism, drugs, body technology, historical metafiction, etc.: it is also an interesting contribution to the postmodern critical genre of “retroactive rereading”—I am thinking of books like Robert Kiely’s Reverse Tradition, Michael André Bernstein’s Foregone Conclusions, David Galef’s collection Second Thoughts, or Postmodernism Across the Ages, edited by Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber. Although We, the “Other Victorians” is less directly concerned with the perspectival phenomenon of hindsight, it does acquire occasionally this interesting hermeneutic dimension. In dealing with such a wide topic as nineteenth-century “thought” or “culture,” a problem arises through the lack of clear borders as to what will count as “cultural studies.” For instance, this work fails to consider such people as Spencer, Darwin, Matthew Arnold, Newman, William Morris, or, why not, Marx, Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, Ada Byron, Pankhurst, Nightingale, Oscar Wilde, etc. I only mean, of course, that the volume was not planned as a treatise, as it originates in a call for papers. It could not therefore be intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. It is instead a collection of papers related in their concerns and approach, interestingly varied so as to provide a number of strategical vantage points from which to survey the cultural landscape, but hardly trying to map the contemporary relevance of 19th-century thought as a whole, which would be a rather taller order. Half the papers in the collection are good, with a couple of excellent ones, the other half are middling although still worth reading for scholars interested in the specific subjects they deal with. There is just one contribution from Spain, most being by scholars working in British, American or overseas universities, although there are no “celebrity” scholars among the contributors. The book’s title nods to Foucault’s genealogical critique of discourses and institutions. Actually, it has been inspired by the mistranslation of “Nous autres, Victoriens” (“We Victorians”) rendered as “We, other Victorians” in the English-language edition of the History of Sexuality—a blooper possibly due to a short-circuit in the translator’s mind with the title of Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians. (And who knows, Marcus may well have