Vathek

• One of the strangest and most unforgettable eighteenth-century novels, Vathek's tale of the Caliph's obsessive quest for knowledge, and his eternal damnation, is a wild Gothic fantasy whose sensuous imagination and grotesque comedy have inspired writers from Byron to Lovecraft.
• New introduction by Thomas Keymer pays special attention to the novel's literary qualities, its hybrid nature and its connections with oriental fiction and the Gothic, in a culturally broad context, as well as to its origins and Beckford's scandalous public persona.
• Includes selections from the important original annotations in the lifetime editions of 1786 and 1816 as well as new modern notes.
• Comprehensive bibliography.
• The most critically up-to-date and accessible edition, and a founding text of modern fantasy literature.

New to this edition

• Introduction by Thomas Keymer.
• New, fuller notes.
• Up-to-date bibliography.
• New chronology of the author.
• Reset text.

Readership: Readers of classic fiction, especially Gothic and fantasy literature; students of eighteenth-century literature, the eighteenth-century novel, Gothic, oriental fiction, Romanticism. Also courses on gender studies/queer theory, postcolonialism, fantasy literature.

William Beckford

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.