When Nature Strips for Battle: Andrew McGahan’s The Rich Man’s House, an Eco-epic of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Placing McGahan’s last novel in the context of his interest in the opposition between nature and man-made constructions explored in some of his earlier works, the paper explores the epic scale of this conflict as it plays out in his last novel, The Rich Man’s House. Namely, various conventions of the epic genre are adopted and adapted to suggest the historical, global and national importance of the battle between the self-aggrandising mankind and nature on the brink of survival.