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This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1771.

Events

  • April 9 – Pedro Correia Garção is arrested and committed to prison by Sebastião de Melo, Marquis of Pombal.
  • unknown dates
  • 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 ("History of Lady von Sternheim"), 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: The Nouvi Zákon, a translation of the New Testament into the Prekmurje Slovene language by István Küzmics, the Hungarian Slovene writer and evangelical pastor, is published (in Halle).
  • Archbishop Richard Robinson founds the Armagh Public Library in the north of Ireland.

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
  • Louis-Sébastien Mercier – L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais
  • 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
  • Samuel Foote – The Maid of Bath
  • 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 (approximate year)
  • Thomas Pennant – A Tour in Scotland
  • Richard Price – Observations on Reversionary Payments
  • William Smellie – Encyclopædia Britannica (in 100 volumes)
  • 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 (died 1810)
  • February 5 – John Lingard, English historian and Catholic priest (died 1851)
  • March 23 – Lumley Skeffington, English playwright and fop (died 1850)
  • June 13 – Sydney Smith, English wit and cleric (died 1845)
  • August 15 – Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist and poet (died 1832)
  • November 4 – James Montgomery, Scottish-born poet and hymnist (died 1854)
  • December 25 – Dorothy Wordsworth, English diarist and poet (died 1855)
  • December 26 – Heinrich Joseph von Collin, Austrian dramatist (died 1811)

Deaths

  • January 11 – Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, French philosopher (born 1704)
  • February 2 – John Lockman, English historian, poet and translator (born 1698)
  • March 9 – Henry Pemberton, English man of letters and physician (born 1694)
  • May 21 – Christopher Smart, English poet (born 1722)
  • July 30 – Thomas Gray, English poet (born 1716)
  • September 17 – Tobias Smollett, Scottish novelist, journalist and translator (born 1721)
  • October 14 – John Gill, English theologian (born 1697)
  • December 26 – Claude Adrien Helvétius, French philosopher (born 1715)
  • probable – Luis Galiana y Cervera, Spanish theologian, philologist and writer (born 1740)

References