Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance presents two masterpieces of Bengali literature by Rabindranath Tagore’s nephews, Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore. The Make-Believe Prince is the delightful story of a king, his two wives, a trickster monkey, a witch, and a helper from another world who is not a ‘fairy godmother’. Abanindranath deploys traditional children’s rhymes and paints exquisite word-pictures in his original rendering of a tale which has its roots in Bengali folktale materials in various genres. Toddy-Cat the Bold sees a group of brave comrades seek help from a young boy to rescue the son of their leader from the Two-Faced Rakshasa of the forest. Here, a more numinous supernatural helper appears. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, it presents a comic, exciting, and mysterious journey quite unlike Carroll’s, with many traditional local touches and an unexpected ending.

This book is a study of modern Bengali words based on the data obtained from a corpus of written texts. The author has used all kinds of data, information and examples from the Bengali corpus to shape up this text. He has made an empirical attempt to analyse Bengali words and other lexical items from the perspective of their surface orthographic representation to understand the internal structure of their composition with a focus on their functional roles in various contexts of their usage within texts. In order to achieve this goal, he has established a link between the internal composition and external representation of words within an interface of usage and function of words in texts. The issues addressed in the book include decomposition of words, interpretation of function of word-formative elements and analysis of lexico-semantic identities of the word-formative elements in relation to their function in words.