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Dissidence 161the question of a national language, Manzoni published anextensive revision of the first version of I promessi sposi whichrecast it in the Tuscan dialect, undertaking the nationalisticproject of unifying Italy through its language and literature, atonce situating his text in the Italian literary canon andestablishing a linguistic model for fiction which could beunderstood by most Italian readers (Reynolds 1950). BecauseTarchetti’s fantastic narratives were written in the Tuscan dialect,they took the major language on a line of escape thatdeterritorialized the dominant fictional discourse. He used theItalian literary standard to produce Gothic tales, a genre that wasnot merely marginal in relation to realism, but that existed inItalian culture primarily as sporadic translations of a few foreignwriters, namely Hoffmann, Poe, and Adelbert von Chamisso. 3Traced with German, English, French, even Arabic texts,Tarchetti’s tales foregrounded what realism repressed, thediscursive and ideological determinations of subjectivity. In hisforeign-derived, fantastic narratives, the standard dialect wasturned into a political arena where the bourgeois individualismof realist discourse was contested in order to interrogate variousclass, gender, and racial ideologies. Nevertheless, Tarchetti’sOrientalism shows that he did not have his cultural politicsentirely under control: his interrogations were democraticallydirected, but they sometimes repressed the ideologicalcontradictions precipitated by their own materials and methodsof appropriating them.IIMethods of cultural appropriation like translation would clearly beuseful to Tarchetti’s project of putting the major language to minoruses. And the deterritorializing effect of this project would clearlymake his translations foreignizing in their impact on dominantcultural values in Italian. His most intensive utilization of thestandard dialect did in fact occur in his translation of a foreignfantastic narrative, an English Gothic tale written by MaryWollstonecraft Shelley. The political significance of Tarchetti’stranslation, however, is complicated by the fact that it is a plagiarismof the English text.In 1865, Tarchetti published a tale entitled “Il mortale immortale(dall’inglese)” (“The Immortal Mortal (From the English)”) in the