The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
We think of culture as just something that happened, that people just happen to be the way they are as the result of some inevitable historical force. There is more to it than that, however, there are waves of thought, fashions if you will, that sometimes make great changes in our culture and in ourselves. One of the schools of thought that some think has come to define much about the modern world is romanticism. This book outlines its birth as a conscious school of thought. Goethe was a name that I have often heard, including that he was still...