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In this article, following the convention adopted in The annotated Alice (Gardner 2000), the authors refer to the combined volume of Lewis Carroll’s works – entitled Alice in Wonderland – which includes Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking-glass – as ‘the Alice texts’. In the Alice texts, Alice is presented as a Victorian female protagonist who has to ‘fall down’ in order to ‘grow up’. This is also true of Yvaine in Neil Gaiman’s Victorian-based novel, Stardust (1999). Both protagonists experience ‘falling down’, which also carries the symbolic weight of being an act of submission – falling into a subordinate state. In looking at the significance of the opposing movements up and down as indicative of a specific process of female domestication, postmodern and poststructuralist theory explains how this binary opposition fulfils a specific didactic function in Victorian and Victorian-based fairy tale narratives. Historical approaches to Victorian society also demonstrate the submissive role assigned to women in Victorian society. While ‘un-domestication’ is rejected in favour of domestic submission in Carroll’s and Gaiman’s narratives, ‘un-domestication’ results in the liberation of their central female protagonists in the filmic revisionings, Alice in Wonderland (2010), directed by Tim Burton, and Stardust (2007), directed by Matthew Vaughn.

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Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, often categorized within the genre of speculative fiction, is a work that presents the reader with a reluctant time-travelling central female protagonist and primary narrator, Claire Beauchamp. As a work of speculative fiction, key concerns pertaining to what this fictional genre's purpose is to center on the re-imagining, and even dissolution, of absolute categorizations of time, space, and gender. Outlander exemplifies this overturning and destabilization of traditional understandings of time, and Gabaldon centers this exploration on the seemingly timeless artifacts of the standing stones at Craigh na Dun. The potential of the stones and Claire to simultaneously inhabit suspended states of dissolution and reconciliation characterizes them as liminal, as defined by Victor Turner. They represent a simultaneous everything- and nothing-ness, existing in a state of synchronicity within which a multiplicity of modes of being and meaning are generated. Liminal, postmodernist, and posthumanist theory reveal how the relationship between Claire and the standing stones may be read as manifesting a temporal perpetuality that challenges the linear organizations of time and history.