The present study has a dual objective. Firstly, it is concerned with developing a method applicable in analyses of fictional portraits, drawing upon various concepts of characterization and personality found with the spheres of criticism and psychology. Secondly, this method will be applied to portraits in Finnish-language peasant literature. The immediate purpose is to explicate the representation of peasants within Finnish fiction, going into the reasons behind the changes in it and the quality of those changes. The analysis of characterizations is structured on E.M. Forster's theory of round and flat characters, S. Chatman's conception of an open-ended portraits, and on R.B. Cattell's classification of personality traits. W.C. Booth's types of narrative were employed when assessing the effects of narrative structure on characterization. The research comprises 29 portrayals of male peasants found in a total of 37 novels (some 12,000 pages in all). The results show that the following influences were reflected in the characterizations of countrymen: 1) the sets of norms pertaining to various literary periods, 2) ideological and social movements of the time, 3) contemporary historical reality, and 4) the themes of agrarian representations (apologia for rural life ). Cattell's feature analysis as used in the literary framework proved feasible: 1) in analyses of extensive prose works close to psychological realism, 2) in discussions comprising several works, 3) when the effects of several phenomena are being studied simultaneously (eg. literary period and political ideology). In addition to preliminary comparisons between characterizations of people representing different nationalities and cultures, the method is also well suited for the use of literary material in social studies.