An Archival Text within A Text: Valeria Luiselli’s 'Lost Children Archive'

Authors

• Kayla J. Baur, CUNY Queens CollegeFollow

Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

Spring 2021

Abstract

The novel Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is an extremely referential novel, so much so that she creates an archival text of her own to support her story and the ideas she is trying to convey to readers about the border crisis. She crafts this archival text, Elegies for Lost Children by Ella Composanto, as a guide for both the narrators and readers so that they may understand the titular lost children and train themselves to see the book from a political narrative. This peculiar decision to include a made-up literary source as the primary focus of her archive instead of the extensive list of real archived texts emphasizes Luiselli’s intentions to encourage readers to find the parallels and similarities in theme between the main story and the novel-within-a-novel.