These days, when one thinks of Gothic literature, pop-culture phenomena such as Twilight, True Blood and Harry Potter may immediately spring to mind. But in a literary sense, the heyday of Gothic writing was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the works of luminaries such as Horace Walpole, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe and William Godwin, according to Ellen Malenas Ledoux, an associate professor of English and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Rutgers–Camden.