Mendes, Ana Cristina2017-10-122017-10-122013Mendes, Ana Cristina. "(Read)dressing the Victorian past in the filmic adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s Possession". A Scholar for all Seasons: Homenagem a João de Almeida Flor. J. Carlos Viana Ferreira, et al. (eds). Lisboa: CEAUL. 2013. 157-162978-972-8886-21-9http://hdl.handle.net/10451/29283This chapter addresses Neil LaBute's 2002 film adaptation of Byatt's novel Possession (1990), and its recriation of Victorian England. In this text it will be demonstrated that heritage films such as Possession show a thematic preoccupation with class and gender and are implicitly aware of their inability to re-create the past even as they journey into it through a visual emphasis on historical accuracy. The focus is on the ways the past acts upon the present, and vice-versa, in LaBute’s twenty-first century discourse about the nineteenth century. How do texts and ideas of the past act upon the present? Does the way that we read the past say more about us than it does about any “real” past? Do we speak the past, or does the past speak us?engByatt, Antonia Susan, 1936-..... PossessionAdaptationCinemaVictorian culturebook part