Vathek
A caliph whose glance can kill builds a tower to read the stars, and is offered the treasures of the pre-Adamite sultans by a hideous stranger who names fifty children and the renunciation of his faith as the price of entry. His sorceress mother urges him on through sacrifice and desecration as the road runs east toward the halls beneath the mountain. Beckford wrote it in French at twenty-one, out of Galland's Arabian Nights and his own enormous fortune; it gave the Gothic its orientalist wing and Byron one of his favorite books.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ One Thousand and One Nights
- influenced by ↑ The Castle of Otranto
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 53% · 10 shared
- 48% · 11 shared
- 48% · 10 shared
- 44% · 10 shared
- 43% · 9 shared
- 43% · 9 shared