The turn of the millennium is meatfiction’s moment in American literature, when, after the end of postmodernism, writers began to turn its metafictional tricks towards new and urgent ethical ends. The subsequent ‘animal turn’ in the novel has its corollary turn in critical theory, each born out of (and in conversation with) the assumptions and conclusions of postmodernism. Where animal studies cleaves to postmodernism’s anti-humanism, however, the fiction of this period works to restore the humanism that postmodernism is said to have evacuated from the novel. By bringing these two fields into conversation, this book aims to bring a consideration of animal life to criticism of the ‘post-postmodern’ novel where it has been wholly neglected, while also bringing the humanism of that field to bear on animal studies. Charting the origin of meatfiction against the intensification of the meat industry on the one hand, and against the historical development of the novel, metafiction, and realism on the other, this introductory chapter also argues that literary animal studies lacks a necessary engagement with America and, especially, with the American romantic tradition, which context brings fresh (which is to say, rather conservative) notions of sin, soul, and salvation to the field.