Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name is a reference to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages (late 5th to the late 15th centuries), which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels. The first work to call itself “Gothic” was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). The Gothic influence continued into the early 19th century, works by the Romantic poets, and novelists.