Foreign literature is mastered in basic and secondary general education predominantly in a survey and introductory mode, whereas the requirements for subject-specific and metasubject results presuppose analytical work with a foreign-culture literary text, for which classroom time is systematically insufficient. The discrepancy between the declared depth of mastery and the actually implemented superficial reading constitutes the problem examined in the study. The aim is to substantiate the didactic mechanism through which project activity shifts the study of foreign literature from the introductory mode to the in-depth one. The methodology comprises conceptual-categorial analysis, a comparative approach, content analysis of the regulatory framework and structural-functional modelling. An author's typology of educational projects in foreign literature is constructed, ordered by the dominant didactic function, and a correspondence is established between project types and groups of planned results of the federal educational standard. It is shown that depth is achieved not by increasing the volume of reading but by a change in the learner's cognitive position: a transition from reproducing information about a foreign-culture text to an independent operation upon it – comparative, interpretive, translational-contrastive. The distinction between the project and research components in work with foreign literature is set not by procedure but by the nature of the final product. The resulting typology orders scattered methodological descriptions and fixes the condition under which the project format retains literary rather than country-studies content.