In ‘Romanticism and “Anti-Self-Consciousness,”’ Geoffrey H. Hartman articulates this classic formulation of the relation between the natural world and human consciousness: ‘It is the destiny of consciousness, or as the English Romantics would have said, of Imagination, to separate from nature, so that it can finally transcend not only nature but also its lesser forms’ (49). Hartman inveighs against both the naïve ‘return to nature’ that had become signal and sound of Romanticism and also the degraded, overly mediated self-consciousness of young William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold. The uncomfortableness with a naïve return to nature has persisted in Romantic studies, particularly when investigating the relation between an embodied imagination and the world it inhabits. Proto-cognitive science and a robust array of scientific discourses have unveiled a materialist brain at the center of Romanticism processing a world of dynamic materiality. This scientific materialist turn has been sung in polyphonic dissonance with posthuman approaches to materiality, especially new feminist materialisms, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology, which each posit a retro-futuristic version of the ‘return to nature.’ Their ontological project assumes the human and nonhuman as always already entangled, whether by a monist substance or as a series of separate but interacting objects.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, these approaches to Romantic matter parallel the debate in consciousness studies surrounding the provenance of the consciousness itself. Materialists such David Chalmers postulate a materialist brain not split from a Cartesian mind but amassing enough complexity to allow consciousness to emerge – even while still searching for a means to explain how emergence occurs. Meanwhile, vigor has returned to those, such as Thomas Nagel, who espouse panpsychism as a more elegant solution to the brain–mind–consciousness debates, suggesting that all matter already has within it experiences of mentality, whether or not we have human access to those nonhuman antics. Panpsychism has particular affinity with the ontological turn since both espouse the entanglement of mind and matter of one kind or another – whether Stacy Alaimo's trans-corporeality, Karen Barad's intra-active entanglements, Jane Bennett's vibrant matter, or Graham Harman's objects. Steven Shaviro presupposes that all things have both interior lives and exterior qualities, however different they might be (107).

I draw these parallels not to engage in a further binaristic debate about whether new materialism and panpsychism flatten ontologies and destroy the thinking, conscious subject, however it arises from matter.