Magnificent Rebels

By Andrea Wulf,

Book cover of Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

Book description

Chosen as a BOOK OF THE YEAR in The Times, The Spectator, Prospect, Sunday Times, Economist, New Statesman, Telegraph, Financial Times, TLS, New York Times, and Washington Post.

'This is ridiculous. No book about German philosophy has any right to be this fun. This witty, gossipy, sparkling history . .…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Magnificent Rebels as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is history told in the most exciting way: through the lives of outstanding and accomplished people of the era in the small university town of Jena, Germany, 1794-1803.

Among figures such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Novalis, we learn about the poet and thinker August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, the beautiful, gifted, and passionate Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, who inspired them all.

Readers will be surprised to find many sources of the art and thought of Romantics, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, and Thoreau, in this account of a few revolutionary short years that created…

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