This preliminary report sets the Folktale project, an interdisciplinary cooperative effort involving literary criticism, linguistics, the craft of translation, psychology, and statistics, in the context of reading and reading research in the modern world, and discusses experimental reader response research in Denmark as well as in other countries. It also explains why oral folktales are used as texts for the study. In order to establish patterns in readers' experiences, independent of nationality, and identify aspects and features in the literary experience, the report lists four objectives: (1) to develop methods, procedures, and means for conducting reliable cross-cultural and international studies, primarily in the field of reader response; (2) to determine the extent to which it is possible to establish "identity" between the "same" work of literature in different languages; (3) to determine aspects in the readers' experiences of narratives which are independent of the readers themselves in terms of age, sex, status, nationality, and thus to shed some light on aspects which are common to human experience of narratives; and (4) to further knowledge about the extent to which it is possible to transfer results in the field of experimental reader response research from one country to another. The report also indicates the set-up for the main data-collection to be used in the study section of the project. Three figures are included, and 15 references and an overview of the project are appended. (MS)