1766 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1766.

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 (Stockton-on-Tees) 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.
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.

Francis Blackburne – The Confessional
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
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''