LITERARY LEGACY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL THEMES: STATISTICAL PATTERNS IN THE SELECT SUSPENSE THRILLER NOVELS OF SIDNEY SHELDON AND TILLY BAGSHAWE

Abstract

Readers are always arrested by the indepth inquiry of suspense thriller novels in complexness of psychology, trauma and shattered self. This paper presents a statistical research study of the themes of trauma, dissociation and multiple identity in the selected eight novels of Sidney Sheldon and Tilly Bagshawe in order to investigate how these psychological aspects are employed and utilised by the authors to fabricate a gripping story that transcend the readers immediately into another world of heightened emotions, anxiety and surprise.Through the quantitative content analysis and statistical visualization methods, this paper explores the pattern of frequency of psychological themes, diligently handled by the authors in their narratives and how these themes resound in the readers’ mind on varied levels. The present research traces out five major and primary classes of psychological themes namely trauma (45.4%), psychological manipulation (20%), identity crisis (15.8%), memory loss theme (11.8%) and dissociation mentions (7%). Although these primary findings disagree with notions of artistic consistency, they additionally exhibit a strangely and surprisingly weak relationship between psychological themes across all the eight novels, a moderate lexical correlation between thematic vocabulary and an apparent variation in the average usage of major themes between the writers involved, this research paper underlines the successful continuation of Sidney Sheldon’s legacy by Tilly Bagshawe by comparing and contrasting the frequency of thematic mentions in the novels of both the writers, highlighting the evolution of themes in the process of legacy following. This research study also strengthens the idea that the craft of storytelling in the suspense thriller genre can be lighted up in the field of literary research by the way of quantitative analysis.