“Everything is Always Happening”: Echoes of Faulkner and Warren in Anne Rice’s Blackwood Farm

Abstract

This project examines Anne Rice’s Blackwood Farm as an addition to the Southern literary canon by considering aspects of the grotesque, as well as concerns with history, family, community, justice, religion, race, land ownership, and social class which proliferate in Southern literature in
general. This essay analyses key events from Rice’s text, and key works by William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren in order to examine the extent to which Warren, Faulkner, and Rice share similar themes that reverberate throughout the Southern literary tradition. Finally, this paper argues that Quinn’s quest for identity in Rice’s Blackwood Farm echoes the journeys of Warren’s and Faulkner’s protagonists in The Sound and the Fury, Go Down, Moses, and All the King’s Men.