1779 in literature

Events

• William Blake enrols at the Royal Academy
• April 6 - Premiėre of Iphigenie auf Tauris by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

New books

• Richard Graves - Columella
• Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi - Woldemar
• Ignacy Krasicki - Fables and Parables (Bajki i przypowieści)
• Nocturnal Revels
• Samuel Jackson Pratt as "Courtney Melmoth"
  • Shenstone-Green
  • The Tutor of Truth
• The Sorrows of Werter (anonymous translation of the work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

New drama

• Fanny Burney - The Witlings
• Hannah Cowley
  • Albina, Countess Raimond
  • Who's the Dupe
• Richard Cumberland - Calypso
• Hugh Downman - Lucius Junius Brutus
• Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian - Les Deux Billets
• Robert Jephson - The Law of Lombardy
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - Nathan der Weise
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan - The Critic

New poetry

• William Cowper and John Newton - Olney Hymns
• Robert Furgusson - Poems
• William Hayley - Epistle to Admiral Keppel
• Ann Murry - Poems

Non-fiction

• Anna Barbauld - Lessons for Children
• James Burnett - Antient Metaphysics
• Edward Capell - Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare
• George Chalmers - Political Annals of the Present United Colonies
• Edward Gibbon - A Vindication of Some Passages in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• David Hume - Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
• Samuel Johnson - Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets
• Vicessimus Knox - Essays
• John Moore - A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany
• Horace Walpole - A Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton

Births

• January 18 - Peter Mark Roget, lexicographer (died 1869)
• March 1 - Gottfried Weber, writer on music (died 1839)
• May 28 - Thomas Moore, poet and songwriter (died 1852)
• August 1 - Francis Scott Key, poet (died 1843)
• September 10 - Alexander Voeykov, poet (died 1839)
• December 22 - Thomas Gaisford, classical scholar (died 1855)

Deaths

• January 20 - David Garrick, actor and theatre impresario (born 1717)
• March 4 - Heinrich Leopold Wagner, dramatist (born 1747)
• June 7 - William Warburton, theologian and literary critic (born 1698)
• June 10 - William Kenrick, novelist, playwright, translator and satirist (born c.1725)
• December 22 - István Küzmics, Slovenian Lutheran writer (born c.1723)
• date unknown - Jane Gomeldon, poet and adventurer