Vathek

by William Beckford, Thomas Keymer (Editor)

Overview

A captivating hybrid of Gothic, oriental, and satiric fiction, Vathek documents the fall of Vathek, whose obsessive quest for knowledge, pleasure and power leads to his eventual damnation. An extraordinary fantasy, the novel has influenced writers from Byron to Lovecraft. This new edition combines a definitive text with new introduction and notes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199576951
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/10/2013
Series:	Oxford World's Classics Series
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Thomas Keymer has edited Oxford World's Classics editions of Johnson's Rasselas, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Shamela. He is the author of numerous critical essays and books, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (2009) and co-editor, with Jon Mee, of The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830.

What People are Saying About This

H. P. Lovecraft

Vathek marches onward with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under arabesque domes. The descriptions are triumphs of weird coloring which raise the book to a permanent place in English letters.

Editorial Reviews

"This ornate, orientalist work of supernatural horror from Beckford (1759—1840) is a fever dream for the senses." - Publishers Weekly

"a berserk Orientalist fantasy that's the best-known work of Beckford" - Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2020-06-03
Poisoned Pen kicks off its Haunted Library of Horror Classics with a berserk Orientalist fantasy that’s the best-known work of Beckford (1760-1844).

Vathek, Caliph of the Abassides, is a prince seriously addicted to gambling, feasting, and fits of rage. A visit from a stranger from India who renders him ill and then heals him opens his eyes to the possibilities of further decadence beyond the five palaces he’s already dedicated to the delights of the senses. But the stranger is actually a Giaour—that is, an unbeliever—in the service of Eblis, the monarch of hell, whose goal is to tempt Vathek to damnation by getting him to break more and more taboos. It’s a project in which his unwitting target participates enthusiastically. He renounces the teachings of Islam, sacrifices 50 innocent children to death, and agrees to worship the Giaour on the strength of the Giaour’s promise to bring him to “the palace of subterraneous fire” where Soliman Ben Daoud has stored the talismans that will allow him to rule the world. His attempts to steal the seductive Nouronihar from Gulchenrouz, the cousin to whom she’s been promised, are so persistent that Nouronihar’s father, the emir Fakreddin, is driven to drug both lovers so they’ll appear to have died—a plan that falls through despite Fakreddin’s best efforts. One of Mahomet’s Genii asks permission to approach Vathek in the hope of changing his mind before it’s too late, but it’s too late, and he’s condemned to the eternal fires.

A series of overblown set pieces waiting for Cecil B. DeMille or Industrial Light and Magic to bring them to life.

Kirkus Reviews