1797 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1797.

Events

• June 5 – Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, living at Nether Stowey in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, renews his friendship with William Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, who take a house nearby.
• July 15 – George Colman's comedy The Heir at Law opens in London. It introduces the character of Dr. Pangloss to the stage and the phrase "Queen Anne's dead" to the language.
• August – The British Home Office sends an agent to Nether Stowey to investigate Coleridge and Wordsworth who are suspected of being French spies.
• October – Coleridge composes the poem Kubla Khan in an opium-induced dream, writing down only a fragment of it on waking.
• November 1 – Jane Austen's father writes to London bookseller Thomas Cadell to ask if he is interested in seeing the manuscript of Jane's recently completed novel First Impressions (later re-titled Pride and Prejudice); Cadell declines.
• December 24 – Walter Scott marries Charlotte Carpenter at St Mary's Church, Carlisle, and the couple immediately move into their new home at 50 George Street, Edinburgh.
• Hatchards bookshop is founded in London's Piccadilly by John Hatchard; it continues to trade from the same site into the 21st century.

New books

Fiction

• "Mrs Carver" (perhaps Anthony Carlisle) – The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey
• Hannah Webster Foster (anonymously) – The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton
• Friedrich Hölderlin – Hyperion, volume 1
• Frances Margaretta Jacson (anonymously) – Disobedience
• Jan Potocki – The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
• Ann Radcliffe – The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents
• Marquis de Sade – L'Histoire de Juliette
• Royall Tyler – The Algerine Captive

Children

• Charlotte Palmer – A Newly-Invented Copybook

Drama

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Osorio
• George Colman – The Heir at Law
• Richard Cumberland
  • False Impressions
  • The Last of the Family
• Thomas John Dibdin – Sadak and Kalasrade
• Elizabeth Inchbald – Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are
• Matthew Lewis – The Minister: A Tragedy, in five acts

Poetry

Main article: 1797 in poetry

Non-fiction

• Thomas Bewick – History of British Birds vol. 1
• François-René de Chateaubriand – Essai sur les révolutions
• The Columbian Orator
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte – Foundations of Natural Right
• Lorenzo Mascheroni – Geometria del Compasso
• Thomas Paine – Agrarian Justice
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling – Die Weltseele (Soul of the World)

Births

• March 13 – Charles de Rémusat, French politician and writer (died 1875)
• March 27 – Alfred de Vigny, French poet (died 1863)
• July 12 – Adele Schopenhauer, German novelist and paper-cut artist (died 1849)
• August 30 – Mary Shelley, English novelist (died 1851)
• September 16 – Anthony Panizzi, Italian-born English scholar and librarian (died 1879)
• September 28 – Sophie von Knorring (Sophie Margareta Zelow), Swedish novelist (died 1848)
• December 13 – Heinrich Heine, German poet (died 1856)
• Unknown date – Charlotte Barton, Australian children's author (died 1867)
• Approximate date – Thomas Cautley Newby, English publisher (died 1882)

Deaths

• March 2 – Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford – English man of letters (born 1717)
• April 7 – William Mason, English poet and editor (born 1724)
• May 27 – François-Noël Babeuf, French journalist and political agitator (executed, born 1760)
• July 9 – Edmund Burke, Irish-born philosopher (born 1729)
• September 10 – Mary Wollstonecraft, English philosopher (born 1759)
• October 4 – Johann Christian Georg Bodenschatz, German Protestant theologian (born 1717)
• December – Mathurin-Léonard Duphot, French poet (shot dead, born 1769)
• Unknown date – Yuan Mei (袁枚), Chinese poet, diarist and gastronome (born 1716)