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Characteristic of Contemporary Period

Contemporary literature features realistic stories that reflect the post-war mindset of cynicism, disillusionment, and frustration. Typical characteristics include reality-based stories driven by believable characters rather than complex plots. Settings are usually modern. Well-developed characters are important in defining works as contemporary.

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247 views

Characteristic of Contemporary Period

Contemporary literature features realistic stories that reflect the post-war mindset of cynicism, disillusionment, and frustration. Typical characteristics include reality-based stories driven by believable characters rather than complex plots. Settings are usually modern. Well-developed characters are important in defining works as contemporary.

Uploaded by

JOEY ALLEN RIVERA
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Characteristic of Contemporary Period

Contemporary literature features a somewhat modern narrative, but it also contains a harsher reality.
Contemporary written works tend to be influenced by the prosperous lifestyle that followed WWII, but
this literary class is rooted in the devastation that war brought to the world. A new reality blossomed in
the post-war mind, and it included a personal cynicism, disillusionment, and frustration that is common
to this literary period. Typical characteristics of the contemporary period include reality-based stories
with strong characters and a believable story. Settings usually keep to the current or modern era, so
futuristic and science fiction novels are rarely included in this category. Well-defined, realistic, and
highly developed characters are important in classifying a written work as contemporary, and most
writing in this category features stories that are more character driven than plot driven.

Contemporary Period Famous Authors

1. Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

Walt Whitman was an American poet whose verse collection


'Leaves of Grass' is a landmark in the history of American
literature.

Considered one of America's most influential poets, Walt


Whitman aimed to transcend traditional epics and eschew
normal aesthetic form to mirror the potential freedoms to be
found in America. In 1855, he self-published the collection
Leaves of Grass; the book is now a landmark in American
literature, though at the time of its publication it was
considered highly controversial. Whitman later worked as a
volunteer nurse during the Civil War, writing the collection
Drum Taps (1865) in connection to the experiences of war-
torn soldiers. Having continued to produce new editions of Leaves of Grass along with original works,
Whitman died on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey.

In the spring of 1855, Whitman, finally finding the style and voice he'd been searching for, self-published
a slim collection of 12 unnamed poems with a preface titled Leaves of Grass. Whitman could only afford
to print 795 copies of the book. Leaves of Grass marked a radical departure from established poetic
norms. Tradition was discarded in favor of a voice that came at the reader directly, in the first person, in
lines that didn't rely on rigid meter and instead exhibited an openness to playing with form while
approaching prose. On the book's cover was an iconic image of the bearded poet himself.

Leaves of Grass received little attention at first, though it did catch the eye of fellow poet Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who wrote Whitman to praise the collection as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and
wisdom" to come from an American pen.
The verse collection Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman's best-known work. He revised and added to the
collection throughout his life, producing ultimately nine editions. The poems were written in a new form
of free verse and contained controversial subject matter for which they were censured.

After establishing his career, first as a journalist and then as a poet, he added more to the world of
literature. Despite having challenges in life, he secured a noteworthy place in the list of great poets on
account of his lucid style and thoughtful ideas. The demise of his parents and the cruelty of the Civil war
provided him with an insight to feel the irreparable loss of life. Therefore, he elaborated on the ideas of
loss, death, suffering in his poetry. The notable themes in most of his poems are love, freedom, beauty,
man and the natural world. Regarding literary devices, he often turns to visual imagery, similes,
metaphors and sound devices. Besides these devices, he successfully used the cataloging technique in
his texts to display his great insight into the consciousness of human thought.

Walt Whitman’s Works


Best Poems: He was an outstanding poet, some of his best poems include: “Song of Myself”, “I Sing the
Body Electric”, “A Noiseless Patient Spider”, “O Captain! My Captain!”, “Calamus” and “Song of the
Open Road.”
Other Works: Some of the other notable works he produced include: Franklin Evans, Drum-Taps, “Leaves
of Grass”, Specimen Days, Manly Health and Training, Democratic Vistas and Life and Adventures of
Jack Engle.

2. Herman Melville (1819 – 1891)

Herman Melville was an American writer of novels,


short stories and poems. He is best known for the novel
Moby-Dick and a romantic account of his experiences
in Polynesian life, Typee. His whaling novel, Moby-Dick
is often spoken of as ‘the great American novel’ ’vying
with Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mark
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for that title.

Melville was the master of dense and complex prose,


rich in mystical imagery and packed with allusions to
philosophy, myth, scripture, visual arts and other
literary works. His themes go deep into the human
condition: he explores such things as the impossibility of finding enough common ground for
human communication. His characters are all preoccupied with the quest for that; his plots
describe that pursuit and all his themes and ideas are related to it.

His preoccupation with the limits of knowledge led him to the question of God’s existence in his
writing, to the indifference of nature and the problem of evil. It is in Moby-Dick that all his
thematic obsessions meet, resulting in a great book that goes to the very heart of all those
preoccupations. An emerging field of American legal scholarship known as ‘law and literature’
uses Melville’s novel Billy Budd as one of its central texts. In the novel the popular young sailor,
Billy, accused of spurious crimes, including mutiny, accidentally kills the ship’s master-at-arms
and the Captain, Edward Vere, convenes a court martial. He urges the court to convict and
sentence Billy to death. That fictional court martial has become the focus of scholarly
controversy. What kind of man was Captain Vere? Was he a good man caught up in bad law or
did he deliberately distort and misrepresent the law to bring about Billy’s death? There is no
answer to that and so the novel has become a clear example of Melville’s quest for the
impossible, which we see in all his work.

Melville continued with the sea-adventure theme for Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849),
Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) and White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850).

In 1851, the author delivered what would become his signature work, Moby-Dick (initially titled
The Whale). Moby-Dick, categorized as American Romanticism, is based on both Melville's years
of experience aboard whaleships and the real-life disaster of the Essex whaleship.

References
https://www.biography.com/writer/walt-whitman
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walt-Whitman
https://literarydevices.net/walt-whitman/
https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/literature/30-greatest-writers/herman-melville-
biography/
https://www.biography.com/writer/herman-melville

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