Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War

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Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War frames William Faulkners airplane narratives against major scenes of the early 20th century: the Great War, the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 30s, the Second World War, and the aviation arms race extending from the Wright Flyer in 1903 into the Cold War era. Placing biographical accounts of Faulkners time in the Royal Air Force Canada against analysis of such works as Soldiers' Pay (1926), "All the Dead Pilots" (1931), Pylon (1935), and A Fable (1954), this book situates Faulkners aviation writing within transatlantic historical contexts that have not been sufficiently appreciated in Faulkners work. Michael Zeitlin unpacks a broad selection of Faulkners novels, stories, film treatments, essays, book reviews, and letters to outline Faulkners complex and ambivalent relationship to the ideologies of masculine performance and martial heroism in an age dominated by industrialism and military technology.

Reviews

Michael Zeitlin has written a book that will change the way Faulkner scholars understand the authors 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 Faulkners novels and short stories as part of Faulkners 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 Faulkners Art (2013) *
William Faulkners 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 Zeitlins 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 Faulkners 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 Faulkners flyboy dreaming into art. With this book, Zeitlin has plotted the great authors 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) *

Author Bio

Michael Zeitlin is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the editor of Misrecognition, Race, and the Real in Faulkners Fiction (2004) and former co-editor of The Faulkner Journal.