Thematically, while the book is interested in character (defined as “the relatively stable moral, mental, social and personal traits which pertain to an individual”) and characters (“the representation of a human or human-like individual in/by a (literary) text”), its chief interest is characterization (“the ways in which traits (of all kinds) are ascribed to a character in a text,” and “the interpretive processes by which readers of a text form an idea of that character”). Concerning characterization, two sets of questions organize the inquiry, which can roughly be organized around the headings “How?” and “What?” The former set looks at the narrative techniques employed in characterization, the kinds of narrators who do the characterizing, and the various effects produced by different strategies of characterization; the latter looks at what specific characteristics or traits are attributed to characters, and what aspects or connotations evoked by the notion of character are explored through the attribution of specified characteristics.