node-setting() escaped text

Interesting problem i need to solve, either on the front end or the backend,
not sure which.  I just had an idea that "might" work, front-end, if i could
figure out how.

Sample DOM:

<page>
  <item>
  &lt;html&gt;
    text-node containting escaped html
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </item>
</page>

Knowing in advance that the escaped HTML is well-formed, is there any way to
evaluate this text-node string into a node-set and apply-templates upon it?

Something like this perhaps?
<xsl:apply-templates select="xx:node-set(unescape(//item))"/>




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