And some more Best Books of 2022 mentioning "Magnificent Rebels":
“I was knocked out by Andrea Wulf’s "Magnificent Rebels”. It’s not about the Romantics you might expect: these are the German ones, who congregated in the little town of Jena at the tail end of the eighteenth century. It compasses Fichte, Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, Novalis and a brace of von Humboldts – as well as the brilliant womenfolk whose roles in their intellectual careers have, as usual, been downplayed by history. Wulf has had the luck to hit on a vital (and, to most anglophones, sketchily known) bit of intellectual history that is also a cauldron of fantastic gossip. Feuds, hero worship, doomed love, rampant adultery and stinky book reviews: it’s all here. It’ll remind you of a TLS party" - Sam Leith, TLS
"Andrea Wulf explores the birth of self-consciousness, self- obsession and self-interest. The self was invented, she argues, between 1794 and 1804 in Jena, a small German university town in which everyone hated everyone else and did what they could to derail each other’s careers. Nothing new there, then. Ignited by Fichte’s lectures on the “Ich”, the proponents of selfishness included Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis and the Schelling brothers. The brilliance of Wulf’s approach lies in her depiction of cock-of-the- walk egotism; a wife, for example, was expected to submit her own Ich to that" - Frances Wilson, TLS
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