 As editor, Woodcock strove to keep the journal from being purely academic, instead adopting a tone "serious but not academic, popular but not journalistic, contextual more than textual" (Fetherling).As the first journal dedicated to the study of Canadian writers and writing, "Canadian Literature" supported the "newly institutionalized field of Canadian literature" during a period of increasing cultural nationalism in Canada.Woodcock later attributed "Canadian Literature"s success to having arrived "at the right moment in the development of a Canadian literary tradition, and created its own ground swell of critical activity."