By the way, Cawthorn and Moorcock's list starts with Gulliver's Travels and then continues with a number of Gothic works: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Monk, Frankenstein, and Melmoth the Wanderer.
I started reading Vathek, and it's not a bad Shakespeare pastiche, like Otranto; it's a good Arabian Nights pastiche. It's certainly not Tolkien-esque fantasy, and it's not swords & sorcery, either, but it is proto-fantasy, with a sorcerer's tower, magical monsters, a dangerous quest, etc.Vathek was hugely inspirational to the "Three Musketeers" of the Weird Tales; so much so that Lovecraft's The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath is sometimes referred to as a pastiche of it. Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard were also big fans. Especially CAS.
But I wouldn't call it a fantasy novel. It's fantastic, in the sense that it's full of unbelievable things happening, but it doesn't really follow many (if any) of the trops and conventions associated with fantasy as a modern genre that we know and love.