The history of literature teaching and Portuguese teaching overlaps in Portugal due to the adoption of literary texts as resources in mother tongue classes since the emergence of the modern school in the 18th century. Portuguese became a teaching subject due to Pombaline legislation, which consolidated efforts to create and strengthen the idea of a nation-state. At this time, "Os Lusíadas" by Luís de Camões and other literary texts began to be used in classes of grammar and rhetoric of the mother tongue as models of good language and examples of national imagery, values and national pride. 

Despite notable changes, the language and literature curricula approved through the following decades continued to reflect this nationalistic perspective, intensified during the non-democratic 'New State' years (1933 - 1974) (Magalhães, 2019). After the fall of the dictatorial regime and the democratic restoration in 1974, progressive theoretical currents (e.g. Critical Pedagogy, Sociolinguistics, Textual Linguistics, and Reception Theories) influenced isolated experiments to update the Portuguese and literature teaching. However, these new perspectives were subjected to the previous ones, already standardised (Duarte, 2013). 

In attention to this retrospect, we would like to know how literature teaching has evolved, what place it has occupied and what functions it has played in Portuguese education during the last five decades of democracy. Considering that the variations in status and roles attributed to literary texts in school result from the combination of local sociopolitical tensions and global didactic-methodological trends (Cosson, 2020) and the leading role in regulating education always assumed by the State in Portugal (Duarte, 2013), we believe the analysis of official discourses about literature teaching, materialised in curricula and programs, could answer our questions. 

Thus, in this paper, we aim to identify and analyse possible changes and continuities in the curricula that have guided literature teaching since 1974 in Portugal. To do this, we conducted a documentary analysis (Cohen et al., 2018) of official texts that approach literature teaching.

The documentary analysis method provides the opportunity for social contextualisation of the phenomenon studied, enabling the interpretation of the situation in which it developed (Cohen et al., 2018), which corroborates the study of 'institutional discourses' (Duarte, 2013) about teaching literature in Portugal. To do this, we searched government databases and repositories (e.g. Catálogo da Diretoria Geral de Educação, Diário da República Eletrônico, and Sistema Nacional de Bibliotecas of Portugal) for primary documents such as curricula and programs that have guided and regulated the teaching of literature at secondary education in Portugal from 1974 to the present. Then, we analysed and interpreted the corpus using techniques motivated by the thematic content analysis method (Braun & Clarke, 2012), focusing on aspects that characterised the place and function of literature teaching portrayed in each document, such as goals, content and oeuvre selection. By doing that, we identify possible theoretical currents and methodological trends that have influenced the development of literature as a curricular area through these decades. Besides, we recognise aspects that have remained and changed in teaching literature over the last few decades.

he analysis of the documents that have guided literature teaching in Portugal during the last five democratic decades demonstrated that, despite the significant changes in the statutes that the literary text has been assuming in Portuguese schools, there was never a complete theoretical-methodological rupture process. As a result, the teaching model that aims to guarantee the construction of national identity has persisted since the Portuguese classes in the 18th century. Even with the paradigmatic innovations proposed after the Democratic Revolution, language and literature teaching continued to be defined by dominant political and social demands, which, regardless of the theoretical concepts adopted, have mostly tended to the nationalist and patriotic tradition. An example is the maintenance of a school canon whose core demonstrates the attachment that the literature teaching in Portugal has to its traditional bases. The paradigmatic miscellany that currently configures the literature teaching in the Portuguese basic education system (Duarte, 2013) results from a historical accumulation of dissonant guiding concepts. The avoidance of a revolution in the literature curricula has generated difficulties in creating a literary education process that responds to the needs and desires of students during these fifty years. It has also impacted the democratisation of literature and the construction of a literary community in the country, tasks in which the school plays a central role. However, considering that literary education is not only carried out at school and, even in this case, cannot be analysed only based on the official documents that regulate it, different voices and other contexts must be studied to have a better understanding of how it has been developing and how we can improve it in the future.

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