Magnificent Rebels
The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'A witty, gossipy, sparkling history, full of bright jewels of anecdote... Magnificent Rebels is a triumph' THE TIMES, Book of the Week
'Extraordinary... A thrilling intellectual history that reads like a racy, intelligent novel, with a cast of unforgettable characters' SUNDAY TIMES
'Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession' SPECTATOR
'A thrilling page-turner, by turns comical & tragic... My book of the year so far' TOM HOLLAND
'Elegantly written, deeply researched and totally gripping' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends changed the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. The rulers of Europe had ordered their peoples how to think and act for too long. Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics.
Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.We're still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet. This extraordinary group of friends changed our world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Wulf (The Invention of Nature) delivers an engrossing group biography of the late-18th-century German intellectuals whose "obsession with the free self" initiated the Romantic movement and led to the modern conception of self-determination. The group, which came together in the German university town of Jena, included poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who promulgated the idea of the Ich, or self, as the center of free will; Friedrich Schiller, whose breakout play, The Robbers, "showed how a good person could become a criminal as a result of experiencing injustice"; and philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who promoted "being in nature" as a means to self-discovery. Known as the Young Romantics, their lives and work embodied the "wild, raw, mysterious, chaotic, and alive," according to group member August Wilhelm Schelling. Wulf pays particular attention to the cohort's oft-overlooked female members, including Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a free-spirited intellectual with a "core of steel" whose "refus to be restricted by the role that society had intended for women" landed her in prison, among other controversies. Wulf also delves into the influence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars on the group and explains heady philosophical concepts in clear prose ("Is the tree that I'm seeing in my garden the tree-as-it-appears-to-us or the tree-in-itself?"). The result is a colorful and page-turning intellectual history.
