Coincidence Studies: Developing a Field of Research

This article proposes the development of a fledgeling research field, one capable of being pursued in a genuinely interdisciplinary fashion, and to be designated ‘coincidence studies’. The starting‐point explored in this article is that a revealing history of narrative might be written by abstracting coincidence as a particular formal or structural feature of all narrative and conducting a diachronic analysis of its incidence and function over the longue durée. Taxonomy of coincidence according to type, and the synchronic examination of the way in which coincidence is embedded in particular narratives at particular historical moments is another, and complementary, approach to the subject. Contextualising the kinds of coincidence encountered in periods and in individual texts might lead to intelligent generalisations about the nature of, for example, ‘Romantic’ or ‘Postmodern’ use of coincidence. The present article has three objectives: to consider the general scope of such a field; to use my own expertise as an eighteenth‐century scholar to indicate what an examination of the early eighteenth‐century might reveal to the student interested in ‘coincidence studies’, going into very brief close‐up on Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, providing thereby a case‐study of how the synchronic method of analysis might work in a particular case; and thirdly, to offer a brief prospectus for a book that a literary scholar interested in coincidence might write.