This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1797.
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.
"Mrs Carver" (perhaps Anthony Carlisle) – The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey
Hannah Webster Foster – The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton (published anonymously)
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
Charlotte Palmer – A Newly-Invented Copybook
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
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Osorio
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)
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)
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)
1797 in literature Wikipedia (Text) CC BY-SA