Investigating Literary Motifs in Ancient and Medieval Novels with Large Language Models
This work addresses the need for automated motif analysis in historical literature, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific dataset.
This study tackled the problem of identifying common and differing literary motifs in ancient and medieval Greek novels by applying fine-tuned large language models, resulting in the extraction of motifs that show persistence and fluctuations in frequency, enabling quantitative and qualitative analysis.
The Greek fictional narratives often termed love novels or romances, ranging from the first century CE to the middle of the 15th century, have long been considered as similar in many ways, not least in the use of particular literary motifs. By applying the use of fine-tuned large language models, this study aims to investigate which motifs exactly that the texts in this corpus have in common, and in which ways they differ from each other. The results show that while some motifs persist throughout the corpus, others fluctuate in frequency, indicating certain trends or external influences. Conclusively, the method proves to adequately extract literary motifs according to a set definition, providing data for both quantitative and qualitative analyses.