1766 in literature

• 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.[https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fanny-Burney Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 May 2020.]
• May 30 – The Theatre Royal, Bristol, England, opens. Also this year in England, the surviving Georgian Theatre (Stockton-on-Tees) opens as a playhouse.[http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/BristolTheatres/TheatreRoyalBristol.htm Bristol Old Vic. Retrieved 11 May 2020.]
• 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.
• unknown dates
• 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.

• 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 (died 1715) – Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (聊齋誌異, Liaozhai Zhiyi; first surviving printed edition)
• Christoph Martin Wieland – Geschichte des Agathon
• Anna Williams – Miscellanies in Prose and Verse

• 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

{{main article|1766 in 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

• Francis Blackburne – The Confessional (theology of confession)
• Edmund Burke – A Short Account of a Late Short Administration
• Denis Diderot – Essais sur la peinture
• James Fordyce – Sermons to Young Women
• Immanuel Kant – Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing – Laocoön
• Franz Mesmer – De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body)
• Thomas Pennant – The British Zoology
• Pedro Rodríguez Mohedano and Rafael Rodríguez Mohedano – Historia literaria de España, desde su primera población hasta nuestros días (Literary history of Spain, from the first publication to the present day)
• Samuel Sharp – Letters from Italy
• Tobias Smollett – Travels through France and Italy
• Laurence Sterne – The Sermons of Mr Yorick vols. iii-iv
• George Stevens (editor) – Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare
• Thomas Tyrwhitt – Observations and Conjectures Upon Some Passages of Shakespeare
• John Wesley – A Plain Account of Christian Perfection

• January 15 – Nathan Drake, English essayist and physician (died 1836)
• February 1 – Eliza Fenwick, English novelist and children's writer (died 1840)
• February 14 – Thomas Robert Malthus, English political scientist (died 1834){{cite book|author=Laurence Urdang Associates|title=Lives of the Georgian Age, 1714-1837|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=48YZAAAAYAAJ|year=1978|publisher=Barnes & Noble Books|isbn=978-0-06-494332-1|page=290}}
• April 22 – Germaine de Staël (Anne Louise Germaine Necker), French novelist and saloniste (died 1817){{cite book|author=Tracy Chevalier|title=Encyclopedia of the Essay|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LJtz0iWO4O4C&pg=PA809|year=1997|publisher=Taylor & Francis|isbn=978-1-884964-30-5|pages=809}}
• May 11 – Isaac D'Israeli, English literary scholar (died 1848){{cite book|author=James Ogden|title=Isaac D'Israeli|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=i6APAAAAMAAJ|year=1969|publisher=Clarendon P.|isbn=978-0-19-811714-8|page=6}}
• August 16 – Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, Scottish songwriter and collector (died 1845).
• October 11 – Nólsoyar Páll, Faroese merchant and poet (lost at sea c. 1808)

• March 3 – William Rufus Chetwood, Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist and publisher (year of birth unknown)
• March 21 – Richard Dawes, English classicist (born 1708)
• December 12 - Johann Christoph Gottsched, German philosopher (born 1700){{cite book|author=Matthias Konzett|title=Encyclopedia of German Literature|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5uE4CQAAQBAJ&pg=PA358|date=11 May 2015|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-135-94122-2|pages=358}}

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