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Dissidence 149scapigliatura, a loosely associated group of artists, composers, andwriters who contested bourgeois values in their bohemianism(scapigliato means “dishevelled”) and in their formal innovations.The literary members of this dissident group were at variance withthe highly conservative realism that dominated Italian fiction sinceAlessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) (1827, rev.1840). And some of them abandoned Manzoni’s sentimentalChristian providentialism for a democratically orientedrepresentation of class divisions, realistic but also romantic,historically detailed yet melodramatic, often with a topicalengagement in events surrounding the Italian Unification, like theAustrian presence or the Italian conscript army (Carsaniga 1974).Tarchetti’s first novel, Paolina (1865), followed a seamstress who ispersecuted by an aristocrat and ultimately raped and murdered. Hissecond novel, Una nobile follia (A Noble Madness) (1866–1867), a protestagainst the new standing army, focused on a military officer movedto desertion by distracted, pacifistic musings. The book caused anuproar in the press, and copies were openly burned at many barracks.Tarchetti’s later narratives took more experimental forms. Fosca(1869), a semi-autobiographical novel about a pathological love affair,mixed several fictional discourses—romantic, fantastic, realistic,naturalistic—to counter the notion of character as a unifiedsubjectivity (Caesar 1987). In a number of short narratives, some ofwhich were posthumously published in 1869 as Racconti fantastici(Fantastic Tales), Tarchetti deployed the conventions and motifs ofnineteenth-century fantasy to issue a fundamental challenge to realistrepresentation and its ideological grounding in bourgeoisindividualism.The appropriation of foreign texts was a crucial component ofTarchetti’s dissident cultural politics. He was the first practitionerof the Gothic tale in Italy, and most of his fantastic narratives arebased on specific texts by writers like E.T.A.Hoffmann, Edgar AllanPoe, Gérard Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and the collaboration ofÉimile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian (Mariani 1967;Rossi 1959). Tarchetti adapted fantastic motifs, reproduced scenes,translated, even plagiarized—yet each discursive practice servedthe political function of interrogating ideologies and addressinghierarchical social relations in Italy. His fantastic narrativesmobilized foreign texts to question the hegemony of realistdiscourse in Italian fiction, and yet this mobilization, insofar as itentailed transforming foreign texts to function in a different