Walter Lippmann refers to stereotypes as a projection onto the world. Although he is not concerned primarily to distinguish stereotypes from modes of representation whose principal concern is not the world, it is important for us to do so, especially as our focus is representation in media fictions, which are aesthetic as well as social constructs.

In this perspective, stereotypes are a particular sub-category of a broader category of fictional characters, the type. Stereotypes are essentially defined by their aesthetic function, namely a mode of characterisation in fiction.

The type is any character constructed through the use of a few immediately recognisable and defining traits, which do not change or develop through the course of the narrative and which point to general, recurrent features of the human world. The opposite of the type is the novelistic character, defined by a multiplicity of traits that are only gradually revealed through the course of the narrative, a narrative hinged on the growth or development of the character and thus centred upon that unique individuality rather than pointing outwards to the world. In any society it is the novelistic character that is privileged over the type, for the obvious reason that the society privileges, at the level of social rhetoric, the individual over the collective or the mass.

For this reason, the majority of fictions that address themselves to general social issues tend nevertheless to end up telling the story of a particular individual, hence returning social issues to purely personal and psychological ones. Once we address the representation and definition of social categories, for example alcoholics, we have to consider what is at stake in one mode of characterisation rather than another.