1717 in literature

The year 1717 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• Voltaire is sentenced to eleven months in the Bastille and is banished from Paris for criticizing the Duc D'Orléans. While in prison he writes his first play, Oedipe ("Oedipus").
• The Irish poet Hugh Mac Cuirtin (or Aodh Buidhe Mac Cuirtin) is imprisoned in Dublin.

New books

• Corporate authorship - Ovid's Metamorphoses
• Elias Ashmole - Memoirs
• John Durant Breval - The Art of Dress
• Susanna Centlivre - An Epistle to the King of Sweden
• Anthony Collins - A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty
• John Dennis - Remarks upon Mr Pope's Translation of Homer
• Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon - Poems by the Earl of Roscomon
• Elijah Fenton - Poems on Several Occasions
• John Gay, Alexander Pope, and John Arbuthnot - Three Hours After Marriage
• Benjamin Hoadly - The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church of Christ (part of the Bangorian Controversy
• Jane Holt - A Fairy Tale
• William Law - The Bishop Bangor's Late Sermon (answer to Hoadly)
• Thomas Parnell - Homer's Battle of the Frogs and Mice
• Alexander Pope - The Iliad of Homer vol. iii
  • - The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (with new material)
• Matthew Prior - The Dove
• Thomas Purney - A Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral (part of the Pope/Philips quarrel)
• Richard Savage - The Convocation; or, A Battle of Pamphlets (satire on the Bangorian Controversy)
• Thomas Tickell - An Epistle from a Lady in England
• John Toland - The State-Anatomy of Great Britain
• Thomas Traherne - Hexameron (on creationism)
• Joseph Trapp - The Real Nature of the Church or Kingdom of Christ (part of the Bangorian Controversy)
• Ned Ward - British Wonders
  • - A Collection of Historical and State Poems
• Leonard Welsted - Palaemon to Caelia, at Bath

New drama

• John Durant Breval (as "Mr. Gay") - The Confederates (attack on John Gay, Alexander Pope, and the other members of the Scribblerus Club)
• Christopher Bullock - The Perjuror
• Susanna Centlivre - The Cruel Gift
• Benjamin Griffin - The Masquerade
• Charles Johnson - The Sultaness
• Delarivière Manley - Lucius, the First Christian King of Britain
• William Taverner - The Artful Husband
  • - The Artful Wife

Births

• February 14 - Richard Owen Cambridge, author (died 1802)
• February 19 - David Garrick, actor (died 1779)
• September 24 - Horace Walpole, English writer (died 1797)
• November 16 - Jean le Rond d'Alembert, mathematician and encyclopædist (died 1783)
• December 9 - Johann Joachim Winckelmann, art historian (died 1768)

Deaths

• March 3 - Pierre Allix, French religious writer (born 1641)
• June 9 - Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon, mystic, author (born 1648)
• date unknown - William Diaper, poet (born 1685)