the immediate discontinuities of place are nested within others: Maycomb, Alabama, the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird, becomes a stand-in for the whole of the Deep South; the Pequod, the small Nantucket whaling vessel in Moby Dick, becomes a metaphor for America. In this way, settings become the vessel for the exploration of that ultimate instance of discontinuity: the nation-state.
Ofc Anderson, fo whom novels are titly linked to the construction of natiknl spaces, Has the related concept of homogenous tim.
