Contemporary

The contemporary period of American literature is filled with borrowed examples from all the different preceding literary periods. First of all, it was the period of the Rationalists coinciding with the American Revolutionary War. It had been influenced greatly by the Englightment and the European thinkers of that period. I believe it was from here, a sense of American independence - coinciding with the Revolutionary war - from European literature had developed. Romanticism had developed and America had its own flavor in terms of all the different literary movements. Romanticism revered emotions above logic. There are definitely traces of these elements in the contemporary period. After that, there was the time of the realists - having been greatly influenced by the American Civil war. They had realized that the heroes of the world were not found in the jungles but instead right next to you, the man making your steel, etc, making your everyday life possible. Following that came the Modernists. They decided to scrap everything behind and create something new. Then the Contemporaries... Simply, the contemporaries were simply just extremely unoriginal that they had to "borrow" ideas from all the different preceding periods.