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.One can demonstrate, without difficulty, the intensity of interest that exists in coincidence: in coincidences that happen to us as ordinary people living ordinary lives, and in coincidences transmuted by the imagination into narrative art. Impactful books such as those written by Arthur Koestler, and popular books on the subject, are testimony to this interest. 1 Despite this, no adequate theorising of literary coincidence or full historical survey is currently available. As Hilary Dannenberg writes in one of the very few attempts to provide a narratology of coincidence: 'there has been no systematic poetics of coincidence, either in terms of a comprehensive definition and theoretical model or in terms of a full comparative historical survey' (400). This article proposes the development of a fledging 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 And first by casting up times past, I remember that there was a strange concurrence of days in the various providences which befel me; and which, if I My own next steps across this terrain would be, and I hope will be, to write a book that is an extended diachronic study, with synchronic examples, of the way in which coincidence is embedded in narrative across a range of historical examples. Chapter one might analyse a coincidence that I have