The emic vs etic debate on personality structure has been dominated by self-report measures and
survey data. In this presentation we shift the focus on the source material and explore to what
extent literature may be used as an alternative source material. Using a bottom-up lexical
approach focusing on adjectives (or verbs) to describe fictional characters provides for an
alternative bottom-up exploration of personality structure. This approach converges with emic
research, as emic researchers have often been inspired by personality descriptions in their native
literature and emic personality-structure has been derived via bottom-up analyses. Because a
number of adjective lists have been used with human self-reports, it becomes possible to
compare the personality structure that arises from literature with the implied etic structures based
on human self-ratings. An added advantage of bottom-up analyses of literature is that it provides
snapshots in the (implicit) emic personality structures across time. Here, we review a series of
studies that took such an emic approach based on descriptions of fictional characters in literature
across a number of languages and time periods. Our results suggest that personality structure
derived from literature does not correspond well to self-report data based on contemporary
samples, but the observed structure can be interpreted considering the historical period, the
authors and their audiences. We also note some meaningful temporal shifts that imply contextsensitivity
of personality structure.