Having originated as an exploratory endeavour within the Research Area „Building Digital Communities“ at the Cluster of Excellence „Temporal Communities“, this project has evolved into designing a theoretical framework for conceiving of literary history as a history of transtemporal and transnational relations.

The project unfolds along two principal lines of inquiry. Firstly, it meticulously (re-)constructs the traditions feeding into Horace Walpole's coinage of the term 'serendipity.' This spans from Persian-speaking poets in pre-Mughal India to the cosmopolitan printing landscape in 16th-century Venice, and further extends to the cultural milieu that spawned the conte in 17th- and 18th-century France, involving figures like Perrault and Voltaire. Second, it aims at delineating the contours of 'serendipity‘ as an analytical concept, thereby overcoming the wide-spread identification with ‚chance‘ or ‚coincidence‘.