Repetition is the basic (if nowadays seldom acknowledged) problem that confronts literary criticism of modernism. Faced with the task of reconstructing a vanishing world, the modernists reject the twin perils of a historiless future and a futureless past.

I look at Joyce's Ulysses in relation to Nietzschean eternal recurrence, Eliot's Waste Land as a tragic parallel to Heideggerian temporality, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse as an instance of Kierkegaardian repetition.

Ulysses, in my reading, remains deeply indebted to the Odyssey – but the Odyssey (for it now repeats) gets indebted to Ulysses too. The result for this cuckoo epic, built in another book's nest, is a kind of equivalence – Homer's Ulysses outshines Bloom in many ways but Bloom expands the heroic narrative in one crucial respect. The Waste Land contrasts two varieties of repetition – whereas the scene in the hyacinth garden won't recur, the lusts of the typist and the clerk are compelled to. What Woolf repeats into modernity in To the Lighthouse is the Victorian-Edwardian age – the world of her own pre-modern youth. My reading emphasizes Lighthouse's third and final part and sees therein something many critics deny – a rather happy ending.

If many of Bloom's doings are bathetic reductions of Ulysses' wanderings, by forgiving Molly, Bloom strings the great bow of Ulysses, and indeed does so in a way that outdoes and rebukes his forebear. In reading The Waste Land, I attend carefully to Eliot's decision to move the Hieronymo line down, seeing this as the dynamic and yet destructive moment that yokes the poem together, foreclosing its saving work while preserving its tragic witness. To the Lighthouse's wonderfully austere reticence has made it easy for readers searching for comprehension to go astray. Having disliked Mr. Ramsay in part I, they suppose the man who returns in part III should also be disdained. Rather, as I show, Mr. Ramsay's role in this elegiac novel is to repeat part I in part III, seeking this time a ghostly atonement with those he had wronged before.