New in public Open Access, the French academic book Fantastique et Evenement: Etude comparee des oeuvres de Jules Verne et Howard P. Lovecraft.

Evenement has a specific French academic overtone which isn’t conveyed by simply translating it to ‘event’ in English. But in translation it might be something like The Fantastic and its Events: A comparative study of the works of Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft. The book appears to offer a good deal of historical context, more for Poe than for Lovecraft. This was the author’s first book, and he later wrote more books on Verne, as well as one on vampires, another on images of Bohemianism, and three books of essays on the fantastic.

Regrettably the book’s chapter PDFs are now behind an ‘academic libraries only’ paywall. The so-called ‘Open Edition’ site also hides the licence terms, while using the Open Access symbol for the book. But, for now, the HTML version of the book remains free and public. As it’s in plain-text the pages can also be run through Google Translate.