In the late summer of 2012, following their talk on at the Nordic Children’s Literature Conference in Oslo, Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, co-editors of Keywords for Children's Literature (2011), were asked to explain why their critical map of keywords in the field was so Anglocentric. The simple answer is that they had deliberately planned it that way—in order to keep the volume manageable and increase the likelihood of particular works of children’s literature cropping up repeatedly. But they were haunted and more than slightly embarrassed by the question, as they recognized that in an increasingly globalized, technologically connected world, Anglocentrism in children’s literature criticism is a problem.

While access to non-Anglophone primary works of literature may impede those who do not speak the language, the fact that significant critical terms vary from culture to culture, and language to language requires that we make the effort. To explore the possibility of a more international Keywords for Children’s Literature, Paul and Nel proposed a roundtable discussion, engaging the conference theme of mediation between children’s literature and culture, and using a historical perspective and a cultural studies methodology, grounded in Raymond Willimas’s 1976 Keywords. They invited noted scholars from several countries to help them envision what a more international volume might look like: Nina Alonso from Luxembourg, Nina Christensen from Denmark and Emer O’Sullivan from Germany.