1797 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1797.

Events

 * June 5 – Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, living at Nether Stowey in the Quantock Hills, Somerset, renews his friendship with William Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, who take a house nearby.
 * July 15 – George Colman's comedy The Heir at Law opens in London. It introduces the character of Dr. Pangloss to the stage and the phrase "Queen Anne's dead" to the language.
 * August – The British Home Office sends an agent to Nether Stowey to investigate Coleridge and Wordsworth who are suspected of being French spies.
 * October – Coleridge composes the poem Kubla Khan in an opium-induced dream, writing down only a fragment of it on waking.
 * November 1 – Jane Austen's father writes to London bookseller Thomas Cadell to ask if he is interested in seeing the manuscript of Jane's recently completed novel First Impressions (later re-titled Pride and Prejudice); Cadell declines.
 * November – Wordsworth suggests to Coleridge the theme of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner on a walk in the Quantocks.
 * December 24 – Walter Scott marries Charlotte Carpenter at St Mary's Church, Carlisle. The couple immediately move to a new home at 50 George Street, Edinburgh.
 * Hatchards bookshop is founded in London's Piccadilly by John Hatchard; it continues to trade on the same site into the 21st century.

Fiction

 * "Mrs Carver" (perhaps Anthony Carlisle) – The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey
 * Hannah Webster Foster (anonymously) – The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton
 * Friedrich Hölderlin – Hyperion, volume 1
 * Frances Margaretta Jacson (anonymously) – Disobedience
 * Jan Potocki – The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
 * Ann Radcliffe – The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents
 * Marquis de Sade – L'Histoire de Juliette
 * Royall Tyler – The Algerine Captive

Children

 * Charlotte Palmer – A Newly-Invented Copybook

Drama

 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Osorio
 * George Colman – The Heir at Law
 * Richard Cumberland
 * False Impressions
 * The Last of the Family
 * Thomas John Dibdin – Sadak and Kalasrade
 * Elizabeth Inchbald – Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are
 * Robert Jephson – Julia
 * Matthew Lewis – The Minister: A Tragedy, in five acts
 * Thomas Morton – A Cure for the Heart Ache
 * Frederick Reynolds
 * Cheap Living
 * The Will

Non-fiction

 * Thomas Bewick – History of British Birds vol. 1
 * François-René de Chateaubriand – Essai sur les révolutions
 * The Columbian Orator
 * Johann Gottlieb Fichte – Foundations of Natural Right
 * Lorenzo Mascheroni – Geometria del Compasso
 * Thomas Paine – Agrarian Justice
 * Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling – Die Weltseele (Soul of the World)

Births

 * January 10 - Maria da Felicidade do Couto Browne, early Portuguese woman poet (died 1861)
 * January 28 – Félix Tanco, Colombian-born Cuban poet, and novelist (died 1871)
 * March 3 – Emily Eden, English poet and novelist (died 1869)
 * March 13 – Charles de Rémusat, French politician and writer (died 1875)
 * March 27 – Alfred de Vigny, French poet (died 1863)
 * April 12 – Ernst August Hagen, Prussian art writer and novelist (died 1880)
 * June 14 – Jules Lefèvre-Deumier, French author and poet (died 1857)
 * July 12 – Adele Schopenhauer, German novelist and paper-cut artist (died 1849)
 * August 30 – Mary Shelley, English novelist (died 1851)
 * September 2 – William Stephenson, English Geordie printer, publisher, auctioneer, poet and songwriter (died 1838)
 * September 16 – Anthony Panizzi, Italian-born English scholar and librarian (died 1879)
 * September 28 – Sophie von Knorring (Sophie Margareta Zelow), Swedish novelist (died 1848)
 * October 31 – Jacob Bailey Moore, American journalist and historical writer (died 1853)
 * November 17 – Saint-Amand, French playwright (died 1885)
 * December 13 – Heinrich Heine, German poet (died 1856)
 * December 31 – North Ludlow Beamish, Irish military writer and antiquary (died 1872)
 * Unknown date – Charlotte Barton, Australian children's author (died 1867)
 * Approximate date – Thomas Cautley Newby, English publisher (died 1882)

Deaths

 * March 2 – Horace Walpole, novelist and antiquarian (born 1717)
 * April 7 – William Mason, English poet and editor (born 1724)
 * May 27 – François-Noël Babeuf, French journalist and political agitator (executed, born 1760)
 * July 9 – Edmund Burke, Irish-born philosopher (born 1729)
 * September 10 – Mary Wollstonecraft, English philosopher (born 1759)
 * October 4 – Johann Christian Georg Bodenschatz, German Protestant theologian (born 1717)
 * December – Mathurin-Léonard Duphot, French poet (shot dead, born 1769)
 * Unknown date – Yuan Mei (袁枚), Chinese poet, diarist and gastronome (born 1716)