SOURCE: "'Sabers, Gentlemen, Sabers': The J. E. B. Stuart Stories of Barry Hannah," in The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XLV, No. 1, Winter, 1991–92, pp. 41-52.

In the excerpt below, Seib focuses on several of the stories in Airships and analyzes Hannah's mythic treatment of J. E. B. Stuart, a prominent general in the Confederate army during the American Civil War.

The Confederacy's greatest cavalry officer, J. E. B. Stuart, has long been celebrated in Southern verse and story. John R. Thompson's elegy to the "radiant form" of Stuart, written on the day of the General's death in 1864, was the first of many poems to romanticize and mythologize the warrior-cavalier. In fiction, Stuart appears in the novels of John Esten Cooke (Surry of Eagle's Nest, 1866) and Thomas Dixon (The Man in Gray, 1922), while William Faulkner, in Sartoris (1929), has fictional Colonel Bayard Sartoris shot to death while riding with Stuart's gallant and...