Building the Collective Imagination in the Bestsellers of the Western World

Abstract

This study constitutes the first ever sociological investigation of the contents of western bestsellers, published and examined between 1998 and 2017. The research project analysed the contents, action and values, as well as the pathways pursued in order to construct social identity and create the stories and characters portrayed. It emerged that the cultural industry aimed at producing works with a high level of readability capable of facilitating their diffusion among people of the lower-middle, higher-middle and higher classes of society. Some advance the hypothesis that, in the face of economic crises and slowdowns in the global economy, there has been an increase in the need for literary fiction, for escape and identification with problems, such as the loss of employment, the impoverishment of families and emotional instability, common to the so-called fluid society.