This books presents re-worked contributions to a conference held at Volda University College, Norway, 22-23 May 2000, under the title "Modernity, Nation, Written Culture". The conference was organized by the Ivar Aasen Institute within the framework of the interdisciplinary research project "The European in the New Norwegian" itself a part of a national research project initiated and inspired by Petter Aaslestad, and financed by the Research Council of Norway. The conference aimed at opening the cultural aspects of New Norwegian to a more general and interdisciplinary set of questions and concerns, raised by the cultural history of writing in European modernity. It gathered researchers from a number of disciplines: anthropologists, historians, linguists, philosophers and literary experts whose shared ambition was to encourage dialogue between differing fields of study and to explore the overlapping methods and understandings of competing specializations brought to one and the same object of study.