Who holds the pendulum?

Societal and pedagogical tensions have defined the complex and unstable historical development of literature teaching as a curricular area. To understand this volatile process, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify the sociopolitical phenomena and the theoretical-methodological trends that have characterised the history of literature teaching in the context of first-language basic education. We thus thematically analysed 33 articles (indexed in Scopus and Web of Science) developed under historical research. In this article, the analysis of the bibliometric tendencies and the results from four of the twelve categories revealed (‘content’, teaching ‘goal’, ‘literature concept’ and ‘oeuvre’ selection criteria) demonstrate that literature teaching evolves slowly due to the weight of nationalist, historiographical and instrumental baggage that characterised its genesis. Because of that, new theoretical-methodological currents have less representation than expected.