Since 2005, the Metaphor Festival has been an annual event at the English Department of Stockholm University. From its inception as a small internal affair, the Festival has rapidly grown to a truly international conference, drawing participants from the four corners of the earth. The Festival itself is a forum for the exchange of ideas and reports on research relating to metaphor, simile, and other types of figurative language. Both literary and linguistic approaches are welcomed, as are theoretical and applied studies. The current volume, which contains a selection of papers presented at the 2006 and 2007 Metaphor Festivals, gives an indication of the breadth of approach characteristic of the Festival. Here are papers on the differences between metaphor and metonymy, on metaphor in scriptural exegesis, on metaphor in fiction and poetry, on metaphor and translation, on the methodology of metaphor identification, and on the role of corpora in metaphor studies. Special mention should be made of the 2007 keynote lecture delivered by Zoltán Kövecses, who outlines a theory of metaphor which combines the universality of cognitive metaphor theory with the influence of culture on the realisation of metaphor in different languages.
