Bengal and Italy

1 This interdisciplinary volume brings together research within fields that mostly have been studied separately, from political history to the history of ideas, from figurative to performing arts, from high literature to popular culture, over a hundred years of momentous historical changes in the nineteenth an twentieth centuries.

2 The essays use original and archival sources and untapped documents in Bengali and Italian and make them accessible to the English-speaking public.

3 Despite the scientific nature of the essays, they appeal to the general readership by referring to well-known as well as lesser known personalities, from Michael Madhusudan Dutt to Luigi Pirandello, and from the traders of Torre del Greco to Bengali women travellers.

4 The volume has a contemporary and general relevance (beyond Bengali and Italian readerships) through its focus on transcultural understanding and shows how a genuine dialogue can build solidarities across differences, and difference and diversity can be respected while learning and assimilating ideas and practices from others’ cultures.