Fantastic, Spirits, Pseudo-Science and Risorgimento in Nineteenth-Century Italian Narrative: The Case of Tarchetti's A Dead Man's Bone

Abstract

This paper aims to study the Italian ghost story entitled A Dead Man’s Bone, included in Tarchetti’s Fantastic Tales (1869) to illustrate, by means of this specific case, both the way and the purpose of the reception of the Gothic and Fantastic in Italian narrative. For this reason, it is necessary to frame the textual analysis within the historical and cultural coordinates of the post-Unification years, in order to, first of all, clarify the fact that the operation ought to be evaluated in a specific ideological and compositional context rather than from a thematic point of view. In this regard, the study of A Dead Man’s Bone intends to highlight that the most relevant outcomes of Tarchetti’s rewriting of a ghost story by Théophile Gautier have to be appreciated as the opening for new experiments in narrative forms which root in a rapidly changing situation and, nurtured by the disillusionment of the post-unification years. Moreover, the author’s use of codes and conventions of a specific subgenre of modern Fantastic, such as the ghost story, is also related with his direct involvement in pseudoscientific movements as Mesmerism and Spiritism. It goes without saying that the author’s effort to innovate narrative forms is meant to convey a personal interpretation of the present by means of a new kind of realism in art.