1766 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1766.

Events

 * Early – The young Fanny Burney pays one of many visits to Samuel Crisp, a frustrated author and friend of her father living in retirement at Chessington Hall, England.
 * May 30 – The Theatre Royal, Bristol, England, opens. Also this year in England, the surviving Georgian Theatre (Stockton-on-Tees) opens as a playhouse.
 * July 1 – François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, is tortured and beheaded before his body is burnt on a pyre, with a copy of Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique nailed to his torso, for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville and for other acts of sacrilege, including desecration of a crucifix.
 * December 2 – The Law on the Freedom of Printing abolishes censorship in Sweden and guarantees freedom of the press.
 * unknown dates
 * The Drottningholm Palace Theatre is reopened as an opera house in Stockholm, Sweden, in its surviving form, designed by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz.
 * Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg begins to publish his Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur, in which he formulates the literary principles of Sturm und Drang.

Fiction

 * Henry Brooke – The Fool of Quality
 * Oliver Goldsmith – The Vicar of Wakefield
 * Catherine Jemmat – Miscellanies
 * Charlotte Lennox – The History of Eliza
 * Susannah Minifie – The Picture
 * Sarah Scott – The History of Sir George Ellison
 * Pu Songling (died 1715) – Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (聊齋誌異, Liaozhai Zhiyi; first surviving printed edition)
 * Christoph Martin Wieland – Geschichte des Agathon
 * Anna Williams – Miscellanies in Prose and Verse

Drama

 * George Colman the Elder and David Garrick – The Clandestine Marriage
 * Ramón de la Cruz – La pradera de San Isidro
 * Thomas Francklin – The Earl of Warrick
 * Elizabeth Griffith – The Double Mistake

Poetry

 * Mark Akenside – An Ode to the Late Thomas Edwards
 * Christopher Anstey – The New Bath Guide
 * James Beattie – Poems
 * John Cunningham – Poems
 * John Freeth – The Political Songster
 * Oliver Goldsmith, ed. – Poems for Young Ladies
 * Charles Jenner – Poems
 * Henry James Pye – Beauty
 * Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg – Gedicht eines Skalden

Non-fiction

 * Francis Blackburne – The Confessional (theology of confession)
 * Edmund Burke – A Short Account of a Late Short Administration
 * Denis Diderot – Essais sur la peinture
 * James Fordyce – Sermons to Young Women
 * Immanuel Kant – Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
 * Gotthold Ephraim Lessing – Laocoön
 * Franz Mesmer – De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body)
 * Thomas Pennant – The British Zoology
 * Pedro Rodríguez Mohedano and Rafael Rodríguez Mohedano – Historia literaria de España, desde su primera población hasta nuestros días (Literary history of Spain, from the first publication to the present day)
 * Samuel Sharp – Letters from Italy
 * Tobias Smollett – Travels through France and Italy
 * Laurence Sterne – The Sermons of Mr Yorick vols. iii-iv
 * George Stevens (editor) – Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare
 * Thomas Tyrwhitt – Observations and Conjectures Upon Some Passages of Shakespeare
 * John Wesley – A Plain Account of Christian Perfection

Births

 * January 15 – Nathan Drake, English essayist and physician (died 1836)
 * February 1 – Eliza Fenwick, English novelist and children's writer (died 1840)
 * February 14 – Thomas Robert Malthus, English political scientist (died 1834)
 * April 22 – Germaine de Staël (Anne Louise Germaine Necker), French novelist and saloniste (died 1817)
 * May 11 – Isaac D'Israeli, English literary scholar (died 1848)
 * August 16 – Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, Scottish songwriter and collector (died 1845).
 * October 11 – Nólsoyar Páll, Faroese merchant and poet (lost at sea c. 1808)

Deaths

 * March 3 – William Rufus Chetwood, Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist and publisher (year of birth unknown)
 * March 21 – Richard Dawes, English classicist (born 1708)
 * December 12 - Johann Christoph Gottsched, German philosopher (born 1700)