Different ways of teaching literature in school are often a result of tradition, cultural heritage, and theunderlying assumptions of the motivating reasons for studying literature at all. This paper presents resultsfrom a comparative study of Swedish and French upper secondary school students’ reception of anarrative text and discusses the impact of literary socialisation in relation to curricula. In the first part ofthe paper, Swedish and French upper secondary school students’ written comments on a short story areanalysed in terms of literary socialisation, comprehension and interpretation. The study displaysdifferences in the way the students interact with the text. The French students pay more attention toliterary aspects, such as style and language, whereas Swedish students tend to focus more on content andextratextual aspects. In the second part of the paper, the Swedish curriculum for the subject Swedish forupper secondary school is analysed. The study argues that a combination of analytic and emotionalreading seems to be the most efficient way to create skilful readers. Reading for pleasure in a schoolcontext is challenged by the strong framing provided by knowledge requirements and examinations. Thestudy concludes that this paradox of literature education can be met by focusing on the readingexperience as a point of departure for in-depth literature studies.