1766 in literature

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 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.

• 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.

  New books

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 – Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio
• 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
• Edmund Burke – A Short Account of a Late Short Administration
• Denis Diderot – Essais sur la peinture
• Immanuel Kant – Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing – Laocoön
• Franz Mesmer – De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum
• Thomas Pennant – The British Zoology
• Pedro Rodríguez Mohedano and Rafael Rodríguez Mohedano – Historia literaria de España, desde su primera población hasta nuestros días
• Samuel Sharp – Letters from Italy
• Tobias Smollett – Travels through France and Italy
• Laurence Sterne – The Sermons of Mr Yorick vols. iii-iv
• George Stevens – 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 3 – Nguyễn Du, Vietnamese
• January 15 – Nathan Drake, English essayist and physician
• February 1 – Eliza Fenwick, English novelist and children's writer
• February 14 – Thomas Robert Malthus, English political scientist
• April 22 – Germaine de Staël, French novelist and saloniste
• May 11 – Isaac D'Israeli, English literary scholar
• August 16 – Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, Scottish songwriter and collector.
• October 11 – Nólsoyar Páll, Faroese merchant and poet

  Deaths

• March 3 – William Rufus Chetwood, Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist and publisher
• March 21 – Richard Dawes, English classicist