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In the years shortly before and since the centennial anniversary of her 1885 death, Rosalía de Castro has emerged to take her place in the canon of nineteenth century Spanish authors, and has been the subject of substantial biographical and critical attention. Martha LaFollette Miller notes of Castro that "critics have repeatedly stressed that the note of intimacy and authenticity found in her poems has saved her from the oblivion into which so much of Spain's nineteenth century verse has been cast" ("Parallels" 3). But intimacy and authenticity are not the only notes Rosalía de Castro strikes: this long-dead poet remains relevant to modern readers precisely because she writes sincere, authentic poetry that still retains the qualities that D.C. Muecke, the great anatomist of irony, found definitive to that mode: "it is intellectual rather than musical, nearer to the mind than to the senses, reflective and self-conscious rather than lyrical and self-absorbed" (6).
Most of the many definitions of irony in literature call attention to the opposition of ironic self-consciousness against ingenuous or mystified sincerity. Taking the perspective of the reader who experiences a text unfold over time, Paul de Man in particular views the two states as mutually exclusive, meaning that once you have been de-mystified by an ironic realization, you cannot return to the self you were before (222). Similarly, the ironist's self-doubling and distancing tends in de Man's view to escalate rather than be stable or reversible (220). This would seem to imply that irony is incompatible with sincerity or authenticity, a conclusion consistent with the common definition of irony as a special kind of falsehood, 'to say one thing while meaning another.' But Rosalía de Castro's poetry defies this dichotomy, drawing on many of the distancing and dissociative devices of irony and frequently portraying the ironies of fate, while still asserting a strongly personal, authentic writing self.
A brief digression to explore literary theories of irony in general might be helpful before focusing on Rosalía de Castro's work in particular. Distance or dissociation underlies Muecke's and most other theoretical descriptions of irony: the distance between what is said and what is meant, between what is implied or expected and what turns out to be the case, the distance between what is...