From a cognitive literary studies perspective, verbal art is informative about consciousness and other aspects of human cognition insofar as it indexes the designing mind of the author, represents the diverse minds of characters, speakers, and narrators, and affects the variously disposed minds of readers. All three dimensions – the expressive, the mimetic, and the rhetorical – merit study, yet critical attention in the original Romanticism and Consciousness was devoted almost exclusively to the mimetic dimension: that is, to consciousness treated as an explicit theme in Romantic literature rather than as its underlying cause or ultimate effect. Published in 1970, the volume reprised essays mostly from the two previous decades, a period dominated, especially on the American front, by the behaviorist prohibitions of the intentional and affective fallacies, which forbade any attempt to read the literary artifact in terms of the black-box subjectivities of its author or reader on the grounds that neither the expressive intentions of the one nor the affective experiences of the other are publicly available and reproducible for critical investigation. What is publicly available and reproducible is the literary artifact itself or, more exactly, the relation(s) between its mimetic ‘content’ and its verbal ‘technique’; claims about such ‘objective’ relations are ‘testable’ in the sense that they are ‘susceptible of discussion’ and informed debate (Wimsatt xviii, 32, 34). William K. Wimsatt, Jr, one of the co-legislators (with Monroe Beardsley) of the fallacies, was also among the many brilliant contributors to Romanticism and Consciousness, but his status as first among equals registers in the volume's nearly total silence concerning the actual minds that create and construe the after-all-debatable literary object.

Ironically, even as the intentional and affective fallacies were gaining traction across the literary critical landscape, psychology itself and related fields such as computational science, neurobiology, and psycho-linguistics were being rapidly transformed by what is now termed ‘the cognitive revolution.’ Where behaviorism had confined psychological attention to observable and measurable behaviors, cognitivists across the human sciences began formulating ingenious models, complex algorithms, and ever more sophisticated experimental technologies and procedures in a collective effort to open the black box of the mind–brain to empirical investigation. By 1970, the revolution was in full force, but few literary critics were at that time paying much attention; the allied fields of cognitive literary studies and empirical literary studies began effectively consolidating only in the 1990s.