1908 in literature

Events

• February 15 – The weekly boys' story paper The Magnet is first published in London, containing "The Making of Harry Wharton", the first serial story of the fictional Greyfriars School written by Charles Hamilton as Frank Richards and introducing the character of Billy Bunter.
• March – Ezra Pound leaves America for Europe. In April, he moves to Venice, where in July he publishes himself his first collection of poems, A Lume Spento. In August he settles in London, where he will remain until 1920 and in December publish A Quinzaine for this Yule.
• June 18 – Mark Twain buys a house in Redding, Connecticut.
• Summer – The Marlowe Society stages a production at the New Theatre, Cambridge, of Milton's masque Comus, directed by Rupert Brooke.
• July – Katherine Mansfield moves to London; she will never return to her native New Zealand.
• September 30 – Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird is premièred, at Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre.
• October 3 – The Avenida Theatre opens on Buenos Aires' Avenida de Mayo with a production of Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza directed by María Guerrero.
• November 18 – The release in France of La Mort du duc de Guise marks the first film with a screenplay by an eminent man of letters, the playwright Henri Lavedan; it is also directed by two men of the theatre, Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes, and features actors of the Comédie-Française.
• December – Ford Madox Hueffer begins publication of the literary magazine The English Review in London. The first issue contains original work by Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy and W. H. Hudson, and begins serialization of H. G. Wells's realist semi-autobiographical satirical novel Tono-Bungay.
• December 1 – Cuala Press, set up at Churchtown, Dublin, as a private press independent of the former Dun Emer Press in connection with the Irish Literary Revival and Arts and Crafts movement by Elizabeth "Lolly" Yeats with editorial support from her brother W. B. Yeats, produces its first publication, Poetry and Ireland: Essays by W. B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson.

• Ethiopian linguist Afevork Ghevre Jesus's ልብ ፡ ወለድ ፡ ታሪክ ።, the first novel in Amharic, is published in Rome.
• The Malay tale Hikayat Hang Tuah is first published, edited by Sulaiman bin Muhammed Nur and William Shellabear.
• The Romanian writer Urmuz is known to be working on his manuscript stories, the Bizarre Pages, printed only after 1922.

  New books

Fiction

• Afevork Ghevre Jesus – Libb Wolled Tārīk
• Leonid Andreyev – The Seven Who Were Hanged
• Francis Aveling – Arnoul the Englishman
• Arnold Bennett
• *Buried Alive
• *The Old Wives' Tale
• Bigehuan zhuren – New Era
• Algernon Blackwood – John Silence, Physician Extraordinary
• Alexander Bogdanov – Red Star
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – During Her Majesty's Pleasure
• Rhoda Broughton – Mamma
• G. K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday
• Marie Corelli – Holy Orders
• James Oliver Curwood – The Courage of Captain Plum and The Gold Hunters
• Machado de Assis – Memorial de Aires
• Grazia Deledda – L'edera
• Mary and Jane Findlater – Crossriggs
• Anatole France – Penguin Island
• E. M. Forster – A Room with a View
• John Fox, Jr. – The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
• Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – The Shoulders of Atlas
• Maxim Gorky – A Confession
• Jeannie Gunn – We of the Never Never
• Robert Hichens – A Spirit in Prison
• William Hope Hodgson – The House on the Borderland
• Alfred Kubin – Die andere Seite
• Gaston Leroux – The Perfume of the Lady in Black
• Jack London – The Iron Heel
• W. Somerset Maugham – The Magician
• José Toribio Medina – Los Restos Indígenas de Pichilemu
• Natsume Sōseki
• *The Miner
• *Sanshirō
• *Ten Nights of Dreams
• Baroness Orczy – The Elusive Pimpernel
• Mary Roberts Rinehart – The Circular Staircase
• Arthur Schnitzler – Der Weg ins Freie
• Georges Sorel – Reflections on Violence
• H. De Vere Stacpoole – The Blue Lagoon
• Hermann Sudermann – The Song of Songs
• Caton Theodorian – Sângele Solovenilor
• Edgar Wallace
• * Angel Esquire
• * The Council of Justice
• Robert Walser – Der Gehülfe
• Mary Augusta Ward – The Testing of Diana Mallory
• Jakob Wassermann – Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens
• H. G. Wells – The War in the Air

  Children and young people

• L. Frank Baum
• *Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
• *Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville
• The Children's Encyclopædia
• Kenneth Grahame – The Wind in the Willows
• Selma Lagerlöf – The Girl from the Marsh Croft
• Lucy Maud Montgomery – Anne of Green Gables
• Ferenc Móra – Rab ember fiai
• E. Nesbit – The House of Arden
• Beatrix Potter
• *The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck
• *The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding
• Percy F. Westerman – A Lad of Grit

  Drama