Abstract
This paper focuses on the study of productivity and employment of the metaphor of ship in connection with depiction of houses in modern British fiction with particular attention paid to Simon Mawer's homage to the architectural gem of Modernism The Glass Room (2009), Alan Hollinghurst's densely layered country house novel The Stranger's Child (2011) and also Iris Murdoch's mock pastoral The Sea, The Sea (1978). Given the fact of continual process of blurring the distinction between the realm of architecture and literature it has to be stated that this extensive employment of the ship analogy does not only stem directly from preoccupation of the Modern movement in architecture with technology and aesthetically echoes Streamline Moderne , which might be considered a late development of Art Deco, but it also follows in the vein of Gaston Bachelard's phenomenological study of literary and physical space The Poetics of Space (1958) and entails possible connotations of heterotopia as coined by Michel Foucault in 1967 in his seminal text 'Of Other Places'.