ABSTRACT
The general editors, Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, base their versions on the most complete versions of texts published during Nerval's lifetime, and thus here on Lecou. The advantages of segmenting the text into units with an uncontroversial 'identity' have perhaps proved rather convenient, and the procedures and influence of structuralism may also have had a part to play in this segmentation. The most recent edition of Les Illuminés to publish new textual scholarship is that of the Nouvelle Pléiade. Biographical narrative in the mid-nineteenth century is very much the sibling of the abundant Dictionaries of contemporary figures, and both are indicative of nineteenth-century France's growing quasi-scientifc preoccupation with its own anatomization in portraits, encyclopaedias and 'physiologies'. Since Milner discerns in Les Illuminés a 'véritable unité stylistique', his own comments maintain a careful distance from the compartmentalization of the anatomie, an enumeration-by-figure which so often seems unavoidable.
