Redlands Forum - Andrea Wulf

380 New York Street,Redlands CA 92373

10 January, 2023

Description

Magnificent Rebels. The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of rebels who changed the way we think about ourselves and the world. Forget Paris... the real Revolution in the 1790s happened in Jena, a quiet German university town where the unlikely revolutionaries were not soldiers or politicians but poets and playwrights (Goethe, Schiller and Novalis), philosophers (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), literary critics (the contentious Schlegel brothers) and scientists (Alexander von Humboldt). And at their heart was the formidable and free-spirited Caroline Schlegel. Their collaboration launched Romanticism on to the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest poets, novelists and thinkers across the world. Their emphasis on individual experience, their description of nature as a living organism, and their insistence of the unity of humankind and nature, informed the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson amongst many others. The Jena Set were the first Romantics. And their unconventional lives were laboratories for their radical ideas - about the creative power of the self, the aspirations of art and science, nature and the true meaning of freedom. In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf takes us on a vivid journey through their adventures and misadventures, passionate love affairs and epic quarrels, successes and heartbreak. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self today. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape, but these young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that shaped our modern world. AUTHOR BIO: Andrea Wulf is an award-winning author of several books. Her book The Invention of Nature. Alexander von Humboldt's New World is published in 27 languages and has sold more than 800,000 copies. A New York Times bestseller, it was also a New York Times 2015 Top Ten Book and won fifteen international literary awards, including the prestigious Costa Biography Award 2015 (UK) and the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2016 (UK), LA Times Book Prize 2015 (US) as well as awards in Germany, China, France and Italy. Her new book Magnificent Rebels was published in mid-September and has already received rave reviews. Andrea has written for many newspapers including the Guardian, New York Times, Financial Times, LA Times, and The Atlantic. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and PEN American Center.