Mise En Abyme

“Mise en Abyme” is a French term derived from heraldry, and literally means “placed into abyss”. The term has developed a number of particular senses in modern criticism since it was picked up from heraldry by the French author André Gide.
A common sense of the phrase is the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, then seeing as a result an infinite reproduction of one’s image. Another is the Droste effect, in which a picture appears within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. That is named after the 1904 Droste cocoa package, which depicts a...