ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on theories from cognitive psychology, particularly social cognition and explores that these theories can help describe how readers flesh out and make coherent their impressions of characters. It explains some of the distinctions found in traditional literary character typologies, notably the distinction between flat and round characters. The chapter deals with a brief overview of literary approaches to character types and describes two related cognitive theories, prototype theory and schema theory, that attempt to explain aspects of the organisation and role of prior knowledge. It considers how these theories have been used within social cognition to explain the perception of real people, and then turn to how aspects of social cognition might work in the context of fictional characterisation. W. J. Harvey's book-length study of novelistic characters, Character and the Novel, appeared some 40 years after E. M. Forster's work, but preserves Forster's basic distinction.
