The article focuses on how the category of age is interpreted in George Sand’s The History of my Life, how general and gender aspects are related in every phase of age triad “childhood – youth – old age” and author’s personal experience of maturation coincides with diachronic paradigm “daughter – mother – grandmother”. This corre-spondence helps the writer to investigate her own personal evolution ad absurdum. Synchronic and diachronic narrative levels stipulate George Sand’s interpretation of the conventional opposition “youth – old age” through two pairs of concepts: “youth – maturation” and “childhood – old age”.
The article deals with the peculiar features of the confessional strategy in the novels La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836) by Alfred de Musset and La Confession d’une jeune fille (1864) by George Sand. The author analyses correlation between the universal and the gender marked principles in the authors’ style of the presentation of events. There have been revealed similarities at the level of the plot model (the story of a young man/woman growing up), the narrative organization (confession), the motives’ structure (orphanhood, self-identification, “sentimental education”), which have been determined by the influence of the genre tradition and the authors’ Romantic worldview. At the same time, the differences in the composition, the criteria for the selection of material, the degree of frankness and self-esteem show the dependence of the confessional text on gender.
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