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The article reports on Canadian literature. It states that the TransCanada project has addressed the ways that Canadian literature has assumed transnational and global currency as a nationalist discourse with its roots in colonial legacies. The author notes that the shifts within the field of Canadian literature are important for bringing to the discipline and examination of heterogeneity, displacement, and cultural mobility. He adds that the novel "What We All Long For," by Dionne Brand is exemplary in this respect, and offers a vocabulary and poetics for how differences and alliances can shortcut foundational identity categories in unexpected ways.

The article examines the role of several literary award giving bodies on the cultural policy of Canada relative to its involvement in international free trade agreement. It attempts to trace the implications of free trade on the cultural policy of the country, particularly in terms of funding for cultural agencies and activities. Moreover, it cites the emergence of literary award giving bodies financed by corporations, such as the Giller Prize, Griffin Award, and the Charles Taylor Award, that resulted to the privatization of Canadian Literature.

The article focuses on the journal "The Canadian Mercury." Published in seven issues between December 1928 and June 1929, the contents of "The Canadian Mercury," disclose the emergence of a modernist aesthetic that was trying to counter a prevailing but lifeless strain of the Romantic tradition in Canada, and which would influence Canadian poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The journal documents a transition between poetic traditions. Canadian modernist poetry is not born in this magazine, but its head is emerging. The magazine's contents disclose a moment in which a new aesthetic struggles to find its modernist breath while yet entangled in a Romantic umbilical cord against which it protests. Created as a monthly journal of "Literature and Opinion," the journal purpose, according to its opening editorial, was to replace "the state of amiable mediocrity and insipidity" in which Canadian literature "languished" with a poetic spirit the McGill poets understood as having already emerged in Britain and the United States, and which they believed was "at last beginning to brood upon our literary chaos" in Canada.