“Mapping Fiction” Exhibition Opens at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

Octavia E. Butler, Map of Acorn from notes for Parable of the Talents, ca. 1994.
Octavia E. Butler, Map of Acorn from notes for Parable of the Talents, ca. 1994. (Detail) Manuscript on binder paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in. © Octavia E. Butler. Reprinted by permission of Writers House, LCC acting as agent for the estate. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Mapping Fiction” is an exhibition The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens focused on the ways authors and mapmakers have built compelling fictional worlds. On view in the Library’s West Hall (Jan. 15–May 22, 2022), the exhibition is timed to coincide with the centennial of the publication of James Joyce’s groundbreaking 1922 modernist novel, Ulysses.

Drawn entirely from The Huntington’s collections, “Mapping Fiction” includes a first edition of Joyce’s novel and a typescript draft of one of its chapters, cartographically inspired intaglio prints of Dublin as described in the book, other mappings of the novel and the famous texts to which it alludes, and materials related to the annual celebration of Bloomsday in Dublin on June 16—the single day in 1904 during which the novel takes place.

Read more, including exhibition-related event information, here (courtesy of The Huntington).

Related material: The literary life of Octavia E. Butler: How local libraries shaped a sci-fi legend.


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