Digital Mythology and Arabic Literature: A Digital Archive to Study the Dynamics of the Reception of Greek Myths in Modern Arabic Literature

DIGIMYTH is an interdisciplinary project that adopts the tools of digital humanities (DH) in Arabic literary studies.

It plans to create an open access digital archive through which it investigates the dynamics of the reception of Greek myths in Arabic literature produced in Egypt and in the Mashreq in the period 1850-1950.

Thanks to its intersectional approach that involves DH, literary studies, historical and religious studies, the project aims at having an impact both on Arabic literary studies and on other fields of research.The general objectives of DIGIMYTH are to investigate how and when Greek myths were introduced into modern Arabic literature and to evaluate their impact on its development.

The project envisages two primary specific objectives that address two main questions:1) What are the modern Arabic literary texts containing references to Greek myths?

The project plans to digitize relevant texts of Arabic literature that contain such references, and create an open access digital archive.

This entails the application of IT tools to Arabic literary studies, which has made little use of digital research so far. 2) What are the dynamics of the reception of Greek myths in modern Arabic literature?

While there are studies on the use of myth in Arabic poetry after 1948, they fail to determine the specific function of Greek myths, and to explain how these myths were integrated into the Arabic literary system before 1948.

Resting on the data collected in the archive and on an interdisciplinary methodology that involves literary, historical and religious studies, DIGIMYTH aspires to answer the following questions: when and which Greek myths were introduced in Arabic literature? Is there any relation between the place and the reception of a myth, and between the latter and politics and ideology?

How did the meaning of the myth change over time and space?