ABSTRACT

Ellen Feldman and Jillian Cantor turn to the genre of alternate history in their respective novels, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (2005) and Margot (2013), in order to explore the tension Hermione Lee describes. Alternate histories or 'counterfactuals', as Gavriel Rosenfeld explains, "investigate the possible consequences of 'what if' questions within specific historical contexts", with the event marking the variation from the historical record being labelled a 'point of divergence'. Ellen Feldman's Peter both endorses and counters Riddle Harding's claim. That is to say, he acknowledges alternatives but does not evaluate them. Peter's refusal or inability to evaluate alternatives is another marker of ambivalence, key to his (in)actions, his narration, and crucially indicative of his limited belief in his own agency. Romance's survival seems to stem from its malleability as a mode mythologising the individual self over and above anything else: its empty form, its 'elsewhere', ultimately assuming the shape of a mirror in which self can be projected.