Undoubtedly, the formation of readers is one of the most relevant social educational objectives that contemporary societies assign to school. In recent years, research and educational experience have shown that one of the keys to progress in this purpose is the attention paid to literary reading, as a privileged opportunity for developing reading habits and skills during compulsory schooling. Nowadays, we have access to a scientific field that deals specifically with this research domain: the teaching of literature. This article addresses the creation and progressive consolidation of this discipline in the general framework of educational research. For this, and building on extensive literature research, this essay summarizes the main sources of the didactics of literature, and the difficulties that have been weathered in its formation. Finally, it offers a detailed overview of the model of teaching and learning of literature, agreed on by the scientific community today. The text concludes by emphasizing the need to address the information resulting from the "actual" practice of literary education in the classroom as a central factor in the consolidation of the teaching of literature as a discipline.