Keywords for Children's Literature: mapping the critical moment

摘要

As Anglophone co-editors of Keywords for Children's Literature , we (Philip Nel and Lissa Paul) were delighted to be invited as keynote speakers for the Nordic Children's Literature Conference in Oslo. When we gave our live talk in August 2012, we staged it is as a performance, a dialogue accompanied by PowerPoint images. Because our performance would not work on the page, we composed a print version of our talk to read both as a coherent prose narrative, and as a reflection on ways in which we were shaped by the occasion. In keeping with one of the central mandates of the conference—“to serve as a meeting point for new research environments”—we decided to open our talk on Keywords for Children's Literature by positioning it in the research environments in which it began. We later explained how the book “works,” and concluded by projecting ways in which we might situate it in emerging research environments.