ABSTRACT
Illusions perdues might be held to be a highly specific example of self-reflexivity, with its overt concern with writing, printing, and bookselling. The particular complexity of Illusions perdues resides in the fact that what the protagonist learns to decipher is the selfsame 'literary world' and 'literature' to which, as far as the reader is concerned, the 'carrier-novel' itself belongs. Jacques Neefs is one critic who does not allow the absence of a formal effect of mise-en-abyme to deflect him from a concern to understand the relationship of the external literary world to Balzac's text, and he also goes much further than this. Neefs's broadly post-structuralist interpretation reveals how Balzac's realism is not founded in an illusory act of representation but is manifested through a dynamic structuring field that dramatizes in political and social terms the numerous figures of illusion contained within the novel.
