1771 in literature

Events

• April 9 – Pedro Correia Garção is arrested and committed to prison by Sebastião de Melo, Marquis of Pombal.

• Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling inaugurates the fashion for sentimentalism in novels.
• Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim: Von einer Freundin derselben aus Original-Papieren und andern zuverläßigen Quellen gezogen, completed at Bönnigheim and published this year in Leipzig edited by the author's cousin Christoph Wieland in 2 volumes, is within the tradition of German literature, the first significant novel by a woman, the first epistolary novel and the first "sentimental" novel.
• Matthias Claudius begins editing and publishing the newspaper Der Wandsbecker Bothe.
• Slovene literature: István Küzmics, the Hungarian Slovene writer and evangelical pastor, publishes the Nouvi Zákon, a translation of the New Testament into the Prekmurje Slovene language, with discrete South Slavic artwork.
• Archbishop Richard Robinson founds the Armagh Public Library in the north of Ireland.
• A peak of about 60 novels are published in the British Isles this year.

  New books

Fiction

• Sophia Briscoe – Miss Melmoth; or the New Clarissa
• Claude Joseph Dorat – Les Sacrifices de l'amour
• Elizabeth Griffith – The History of Lady Barton
• John Langhorne – Letters to Eleonara
• Henry Mackenzie – The Man of Feeling
• Tobias Smollett – The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
• Sophie von La Roche – Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim

  Children

• Christopher Smart – Hymns for the Amusement of Children

  Drama

• Isaac Bickerstaffe – He Wou'd If He Cou'd
• José Cadalso – Sancho García
• Richard Cumberland – The West Indian
• Denis Diderot – Le Fils Naturel
• Carlo Goldoni – Le Bourru Bienfaisant
• Hugh Kelly – Clementina
• George Alexander Stevens – The Fair Orphan
• Alexander Sumarokov – Dmitri the Usurper

  Poetry

• James Beattie – The Minstrel
• James Cawthorn – Poems
• John Langhorne – The Fables of Flora
• Thomas Percy – The Hermit of Warkworth
• Henry James Pye – The Triumph of Fashion
• Christoph Martin Wieland – Der neue Amadis

  Non-fiction

• John Brown – Description of the Lake of Keswick
• Charles Burney – The Present State of Music in France and Italy
• John Dalrymple – Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland
• John William Fletcher – Five Checks to Antinomianism
• Oliver Goldsmith – The History of England
• Samuel Johnson – Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands
• Martinez de Pasqually – Traité sur la réintégration des êtres dans leur première propriété, vertu et puissance spirituelle divine
• Thomas Pennant – A Tour in Scotland
• Richard Price – Observations on Reversionary Payments
• William Smellie – Encyclopædia Britannica
• Emanuel Swedenborg – True Christian Religion
• John Wesley – Works
• Arthur Young – The Farmer's Tour Through the East of England
• Real Academia Española – Gramática

  Births

• January 17 – Charles Brockden Brown, American novelist
• February 5 – John Lingard, English historian and Catholic priest
• March 23 – Lumley Skeffington, English playwright and fop
• June 13 – Sydney Smith, English wit and cleric
• August 15 – Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist and poet
• November 4 – James Montgomery, Scottish-born poet and hymnist
• December 25 – Dorothy Wordsworth, English diarist and poet
• December 26 – Heinrich Joseph von Collin, Austrian dramatist

  Deaths

• January 11 – Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, French philosopher
• February 2 – John Lockman, English historian, poet and translator
• March 9 – Henry Pemberton, English man of letters and physician
• May 21 – Christopher Smart, English poet
• July 30 – Thomas Gray, English poet
• September 17 – Tobias Smollett, Scottish novelist, journalist and translator
• October 14 – John Gill, English theologian
• December 26 – Claude Adrien Helvétius, French philosopher

• Luis Galiana y Cervera, Spanish theologian, philologist and writer