In a digital humanities project focused on analyzing historical texts, you are t

In a digital humanities project focused on analyzing historical texts, you are tasked with developing a Python function to identify and count the occurrences of specific literary motifs in a given corpus of classic novels. The motifs include themes like “love,” “freedom,” and “individualism.” Your function should be able to handle various text formats and encodings. Additionally, it should gracefully handle cases where the motif search term is not found or when the input text is empty. How would you design this function, taking into account potential edge cases, and what would the function signature, input, and output examples look like?