Chapter 3 ("The Exemplum as Rhetorical Picture Strategy") is among the book's most stimulating.

The modern attack usually centers around a specific object as an exemplum.

While Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a central text in the evolution of African American female writing has achieved much critical attention of late as an exemplum of the interstices of race, class, and gender in the nineteenth century and its reappropriation of the romance form, Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) and the slave narratives of Kate Drumgoold and Julia A.