Book excerpt: "This volume brings together a selection of the papers presented at the 8th Nordic Conference of English Studies which took place in Goteborg, May 24-27 2001. The aim of the conference was to bring together scholars from the Nordic countries with an interest in English language, literature, culture and teaching. The variety of interests is represented in the contributions to the volume which also contains contributions some of the plenary speakers at the conference. The book also includes a newly written poem by Tony Harrison. Contents include: Polysemy and ambiguity, The last colony of the British Empire: some reflections on the idea of Britain today, On the centrality of stylistics, Syntax and style in some Middle English metrical romances with special reference to the displacement of syntactic components, The suffix - wise: Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty?, `Am I really really mature or something': Really in teentalk, Repair, learning and foreign language talk-in-interaction: a conversation analytic approach. The preposition By in the English passive, Genre, gender and power: a study of address forms in seven Canterbury Tales, Clustering in verb phrases, On collocations in bllingual lexicography, The language of love and the conceptualization of power during the reign of Elizabeth I, Sustained romantic radicalism in the writings of Blake, Hays and Wollstonecraft, Uncovering ""the sacred and mysterious veil"": Mary Hays' use of monological epistolarity in Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), ""This duty must be established into a principle, and wrought into a habit:"" Hannah More and the nineteenth-century self-improvement ethos, The sensation of narrative: strategies of representation in The Woman in White and Dracula, From the flying trunk to celestial omnibus: Hans Andersen's influence on the English Kunstmarchen, The ""invisible line"": The hidden perspective in Evelyn Waugh's Novel Brideshead Revisited, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are not the only fruit. The quest for self, Beyond the borders of home: The subject-in-exile in the work of the two contemporary Irish women poets Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Nuala Ni Dhomhnail, ""Making sense: Mapping in Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,"" When metaphors and `direct' sense impressions work together: a description of an approach, and a search for terminology, The ins and outs of the Mise en Abyme, Outside of things. Swedish emigrants, the English language and the Canadian prairie dream, Interactive learning in culture studies, Problems, procedures, and directions for computer assisted teaching."