Glossing this idea, Neil Campbell and Alistair Kean add the note of conflict: “a city is a gathering of meanings in which people invest their interpretation and seek to create their own (hi)story,” forming “a chain of meanings in competition with one another, with certain interpretations emerging at specific points in time with more authority and subsequent power than others.” This useful linking of space and stories reminds us that both phenomena depend on the establishment and transgression of frontiers; fiction depends on characters straining against or being able to overcome barriers to their progress, just as frontiers exist to impede, at least temporarily, movements in space.

XREF: Connects to narrative theory and literary analysis; the frontier-as-constraint idea echoes Proppian narrative functions and structuralist approaches to plot as obstacle-overcoming.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 271