Michael Zeitlin has written a book that will change the way Faulkner scholars understand the author's life-long obsession with airplanes, pilots, and flying. An astonishing amount of research into World War I aviation is skillfully woven together to provide a rich context for understanding Faulkner's novels and short stories as part of Faulkner's life and times in important new ways. * Christopher Rieger, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Faulkner Studies, Southeast Missouri State University, USA *
Stunning insight, beautifully written. Zeitlin's work changes the meaning of perspective in Faulkner's vision: his ways of seeing. Engaging modernity in Modernism, Faulkner, Aviation and Modern War speaks to a waiting audience about flight itself to capture meaning through this incisive turn in Euro-western mythos and masculinity. * Candace Waid, Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and author of The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art (2013) *
William Faulkner's idolatry of the aeroplane, and of the crazy bold pilots who cut the skies to ribbons with one in the 1920s and 30s, is one of those happy freaks of literary modernism that seemed never to achieve its critical reckoning. Well, here it is. Michael Zeitlin's exhaustive research has deftly negotiated all the pylons, and in his high-octane thrill-ride alongside military aviators, barnstormers, commercial aces and all the dead pilots, we glimpse an aerial map of Faulkner's stylistic physiognomy. That quixotic desire to lift his poly-clausal periods above the turbulence of ideological conflict and draw in the gravid air his stately figures of torque made Faulkner's flyboy dreaming into art. With this book, Zeitlin has plotted the great author's death-drag dromology as the weightless career of a Sopwith Camel along the border between myth and metal. * Julian Murphet, Jury Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Adelaide, Australia, and author of Faulkner's Media Romance (2017) *
Michael Zeitlin's new book is a singular achievement. He is the first Faulkner scholar to take on the whole of the author's flying corpus, and Zeitlin shrewdly analyzes the role of aviation, and, in particular, wartime flight in Faulkner's writing and thought...All of this comes to us in a prose as graceful as those pilots' soaring and dipping as well as through a writerly voice as unassuming and assured as that of men like Chapman, George Guynemar, and Raoul Lufbery were in flight. * American Literary History *
