Rosalia de Castro is considered one of the outstanding writers of Spanish romanticism, and as a pivotal figure in the Galician Nationalist Movement of the 19th century. This volume examines her contribution to the preservation and restoration of Galician language and culture by means of her poetry written in Galician and Castilian. It develops a theory of textuality based on the poem Negra Sombra. Strict philological analysis is combined with a deconstructive reading to the contexts in which the image of "Sombra" is embedded throughout de Castro's poetry. This formulation of a poetic metatheory grounded in a poem written in Galician attests to the advanced level of development of the Galician language and its capacity to illuminate metapoetic discourse through the image of "Negra Sombra".