Meatfiction: The Treatment of Animals in the Contemporary American Novel

This book highlights the efforts of contemporary writers of ＂meatfiction＂ to balance postmodern innovation with a new ethical urgency that the worsening environmental crisis and our industrial treatment of animals begs of us. Beginning with the so-called end of postmodernism and the ’New Sincerity’ that was supposed to have emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, Meatfiction retells the story of the contemporary American novel by setting it at the end of a long tradition in American literature that has always kept animals and meat close to its heart, if in the margins. Through new readings that highlight the absent animals in well-known works by Katherine Dunn, Ruth Ozeki, and Rachel Ingalls, as well as readings of new and understudied novels by Deb Olin Unferth and Chelsea G. Summers, this book offers an account of the deepfelt sin and shame that shapes our most disturbed and most romantic of national literatures.

Jamie Redgate held a Leverhulme Lectureship in North American Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, from 2024-2025, where he also co-founded the Studies of Meat in the Arts and Culture (StOMAC) reading group. Jamie’s criticism and fiction have been published and won awards on both sides of the Atlantic.