In _Frontier Fictions_, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet looks at the efforts of Iranians to defend, if not expand, their borders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She explores how their conceptions of national geography influenced cultural and political change. The 'frontier fictions', or the ways in which the Iranians viewed their often fluctuating borders and the conflicts surrounding them, played a dominant role in defining the Iranian nation. On these borderlands, new ideas of citizenship and nationality were unleashed, refining older ideas of ethnicity.

Kashani-Sabet maintains that conceptions of countries based on the territory they covered existed before the advent of the modern nation-state. Her focus on geography enables her to explore and document fully ideas of modern citizenship in Iran, 'love of homeland', the hegemony of the Persian language and widespread interest in archaeology, travel and map-making. Kashani-Sabet explains what connects people to a specific place. Her approach enriches our understanding not only of Iranian nationalism, but also of nationalism everywhere.