The Iliad is not a work that gives a mere account of historic facts and events but one where persons are the protagonists by virtue of their behaviors, values, motives and decisions which affect the flow of the story. Achilles is one of these persons that play a primary role in the plot of Iliad; as Homer puts it in the first lines of this work, the anger (mênin) of Achilles, his withdrawal fro...

This essay examines Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in light of new archival findings on the medical practices of Dr. James Norcom (Dr. Flint in the narrative). While critics have sharply defined the feminist politics of Jacobs's sexual victimization and resistance, they have overlooked her medical experience in slavery and her participation in reform after escape....

The “staples thesis” argues that institutions in a given region could be explained by the nature of production of its prevailing staples, whereby slavery is likely to emerge in “slave-conducive” crops, such as cotton, rice, and sugarcane. This paper evaluates the thesis using a unique natural experiment from nineteenth-century rural Egypt, the cotton boom that occurred because of the American C...

A real myth of a hero, moves toward a lion and a subversive dragon, is a story of soul evolution. The hero myth shows a stage in which a child is separated from dependency in order to reach to personal integrity. According to Rumi, permanent presence of journey precursors shows that there is no way to escape and not only heroes but also all humans experience passing from thresholds in order to ...