According to Bloom, this feeling of "secondariness" is not specifically a Romantic phenomenon, but rather the very engine of literary history.

There must not be secondariness, and 'tis a thousand to one that her air and manner will at once betray that she is not primary, but that there is some other one or many of her class, to whom she habitually postpones herself.

Hourani describes a sense of secondariness in contemporary Arab identity: 'It is no longer to have a standard of values of one's own, not to be able to create but only to imitate; and so not even to imitate correctly, since that also needs a certain originality.'