Archiving the Print Novel: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

Valeria Luiselli’s (2019b) Lost Children Archive concludes my investigation of multimodal fiction in the early twenty-first century, with this chapter focusing my attention on a novel that is clearly multimodal in its composition though less overtly experimental in its spirit. The multimodality of Luiselli’s novel does not seem to derive primarily from her conviction in breaking down design barriers in literary writing or from her commitment to fierce experimentation with narrative content. Rather, I consider this novel to be symptomatic of three parameters: the emergence of multimodal fiction, the characteristics and affordances of the contemporary framework in which it has been released, and the author’s documentary-based writing practices. In this regard, Lost Children Archive exemplifies a crucial step in the development of multimodal fiction, that of the genre’s practices extending their reach and informing the production of less experimental literary texts, a process that can already be observed in recent publications of fiction.