1771 in literature

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.

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)