Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator, and this week my guest is Andrea Wolfe, whose new book is magnificent rebels, the first romantics and the invention of the self. But if you're thinking when you hear

the word romantic, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, it's not those romantics. These are the

OG romantics, the German romantics. And they all gathered in a little town in Germany

and Andrea tells their story in this book.

Andrea, welcome.

Is romanticism a German invention?

Well, you're starting off with the hardest question straight away.

I'm sorry.

It's not a German invention, but I would say that they were really, so my guys, so which

I called the Jena set, because they came together at the same time, at the same place, at the

end of the 18th century, are really the first to use the term romantic in its new literary

and philosophical meaning.

So before then, the word romantic was used,

but it came from the French word novel, Romance. So it only meant like a novel. So they're the

first to use it as we understand it today. So they are the ones who actually launch romanticism onto an international

stage. So not just by giving it its name and its purpose, but also by providing its

intellectual framework. So in that sense, you could probably say they invented maybe. What they do

do is they influence a great number of people

across the world. So from this tiny little town in Germany, there's this amazing ripple effect

across the world. And people like Coleridge, for example, or the American Transcendentists,

are deeply, deeply influenced by them. And maybe we can talk about that after I introduced them a little bit.

But so they are incredibly important for the English Romantics, for example.

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