1771 in literature

• 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.^[1]
  • 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,^[2] the first epistolary novel and the first "sentimental" novel.
  • Matthias Claudius begins editing and publishing the newspaper Der Wandsbecker Bothe.^[3]
  • 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).^[4]
  • Archbishop Richard Robinson founds the Armagh Public Library in the north of Ireland.^[5]

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^[6]
• Louis-Sébastien Mercier – L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais^[7]
• 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

• 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)

• 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)^[8]
• probable – Luis Galiana y Cervera, Spanish theologian, philologist and writer (born 1740)