The nature of this frame is something Amina Yaqin and I explore in our book Framing Muslims. There we are concerned with tracing this encircling discursive boundary as it appears in political rhetoric, journalism, and popular-media texts. Yet a type of framing can be seen at work in literature, too. Literary framing takes place on three levels. First, any act of writing in and of itself is an act of framing; it is an act of bringing together and accentuating themes, issues, and characters as well as of dramatizing the consequences of the collision of different ideas. This is particularly true of what might be called multicultural fictions that focus on relationships between groups with different traditions and value systems. These works always already occupy a terrain contested by warring and hierarchically unequal discourses. However, that framing act then takes place within a much larger frame: the agenda-led frame governing political, media, and journalistic discourses about the key issues defining intercultural relations. In the case of Muslims, these issues have to do with a lack of integration, gender inequality, a propensity for “radicalization,” and so on. Finally, we can see those two acts of framing—the textual and the contextual—as being integral to the way such texts are then placed in the frame governing their production, reception, and recognition as “literary.” This third-level frame validates certain types of utterance in which those key “Muslim” issues become central to the way texts are understood, grouped together, marketed, and reviewed.

DEFINE: Explains literary framing as operating on three levels: textual, contextual/political-discursive, and the frame governing production and recognition as 'literary'.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 20