Vathek - Literary Significance and Criticism

Literary Significance and Criticism

George Gordon, Lord Byron cited Vathek as a source for his poem, The Giaour. In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron also calls Vathek "England's wealthiest son." Other Romantic poets wrote works with a Middle-Eastern setting inspired by Vathek, included Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and Thomas Moore's Lalla-Rookh (1817). John Keats's vision of the Underworld in Endymion (1818) is indebted to the novel.

H. P. Lovecraft also cited Vathek as the inspiration for his never-finished novel Azathoth. Vathek is also believed to have been a model for Lovecraft's completed novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

American Fantasy author Clark Ashton Smith greatly admired "Vathek". Smith later wrote "The Third Episode of Vathek", the completion of a fragment by Beckford that was entitled "The Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and the Prince Kalilah". "The Third Episode of Vathek" was published in Robert H. Barlow's fanzine Leaves in 1937, and later in Smith's 1960 collection The Abominations of Yondo.

Vathek has been well received by historians of the fantasy genre; Franz Rottensteiner calls the novel "a marvellous story, the creation of an erratic but powerful imagination, which brilliantly evokes the mystery and wonder associated with the Orient" and Brian Stableford has praised the work as the "classic novel Vathek-a feverish and gleefully perverse decadent/Arabian fantasy".