 Although the position of editor eventually went to George Woodcock, the university's first choice was a bibliographer, UBC's only specialist in Canadian literature, Reginald Watters; the position was offered to Woodcock after Watters decided to accept a fellowship in Australia.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.