1734 in literature

This article is a summary of the major literary events and publications of 1734.

Events

January – Le Cabinet du Philosophe, a new periodical by Pierre de Marivaux, is unsuccessfully launched; it is discontinued in April.
June 10 – Copies of Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais are burned, and a warrant is issued for the author's arrest.
November – George Faulkner begins publication of an edition of Jonathan Swift's Works in Dublin with a corrected text.
Manoel da Assumpcam begins writing his grammar of the Bengali language.
Göttingen State and University Library is established.

Anonymous – A Rap at the Rhapsody
Joseph Addison – A Discourse on Antient and Modern Learning
John Arbuthnot – Gnothi Seauton: Know Yourself
Francis Atterbury – Sermons
George Berkeley – The Analyst
Henry Brooke – Design and Beauty: an Epistle
Isaac Hawkins Browne – On Design and Beauty
Dimitrie Cantemir – History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire
Robert Dodsley – An Epistle to Mr. Pope
John Jortin – Remarks on Spenser's Poems
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – The Dean's Provocation for Writing the Lady's Dressing-Room
Karl Ludwig von Pöllnitz – Mémoires
Jonathan Richardson – Explanatory Notes on Milton's Paradise Lost
George Sale – The Koran
Emanuel Swedenborg
*First Principles of Natural Things
*Opera philosophica et mineralia
*The Infinite and the Final Cause of Creation
Joseph Trapp – Thoughts Upon the Four Last Things
Voltaire – ''Lettres anglaises''

January 6 – John Dennis, English dramatist and critic
February 24 – Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, French writer of fairy tales and salonnière
March 1 – Roger North, English biographer and lawyer
April 25 – Johann Konrad Dippel, German theologian
May – Richard Cantillon, Irish-born French economist
September 17 – Thomas Fuller, English man of letters and proverb collector
October – Thomas Lloyd, Welsh lexicographer
October 18 – James Moore Smythe, English dramatist and fop