Magnificent Rebels
The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
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Magnificent Rebels
Narrated by:
Julie Teal
Buy Now for ₹500.00
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Narrated by:
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Julie Teal
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Written by:
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Andrea Wulf
About this listen
From the Costa Prize-winning author of The Invention of Nature, Magnificent Rebels is a riveting, eye-opening biography of the first Romantics: a revolutionary group of friends based in the small German town of Jena whose modern ideas transformed society and the way we lead our lives today.
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.
(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited©2022 Andrea Wulf
Critic Reviews
This is ridiculous. No book about German philosophy has any right to be this fun. This witty, gossipy, sparkling history . . . fizzed with creative energy
Magnificent Rebels is - well - magnificent. This is how such books should be written, with clarity, passion and delight. A thrilling intellectual adventure (John Banville, Book of the Year)
This is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparking ideas
A witty, gossipy, sparkling history, full of bright jewels of anecdote . . . Magnificent Rebels is a triumph
In a gripping account of what she calls the "Jena Set" (which was intellectually and emotionally as complex as the Bloomsbury Group), Wulf brings the dramatis personae compellingly to life
An ambitious, engaging and effusive account . . . a considerable achievement
Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession
Magnificent Rebels is a thrilling intellectual history that reads more like a racy but intelligent novel or even a very superior soap opera where the characters are almost all oddballs, but geniuses
Andrea Wulf is that rare historian who makes the past feel present and turns distant lives into gripping stories of the human heart. Magnificent Rebels is an absolute masterpiece: mesmerising, heartbreaking and incredibly timely, it is an important reminder that the desire to be true to oneself transcends time and borders (AMANDA FOREMAN)
This is a magnificent book, fascinating in its focus and breathtaking in its scope and sweep. It is a work of formidable scholarship worn lightly; of complex intellectual history told evocatively, absorbingly, compellingly. Wulf's superb prose draws us deeply into the lives and minds of this remarkable circle of people, who together explored the breathtaking possibilities - and tremendous risks - of free will, individual creativity and liberty (ROBERT MACFARLANE)
The Jena Set was a group of philosophers, artists, and thinkers so earthquakingly brilliant that we feel the tremors that their ideas set off under our feet today. Nobody but Andrea Wulf, with her exquisite grasp of ideas and personalities, with her meticulous, sensitive and acutely observed prose, could make the reader feel as if they were in the room with them, bearing personal witness to their insights and their vanities and rages. Her storytelling had me immediately in her thrall (LAUREN GROFF, bestselling author of Matrix)
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