ABSTRACT
The most radical literary experiments of the greatest exponents of high modernist English prose both derive their central structural image from that of Richard Wagner’s opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake were notably influenced by precisely the same aspect of Wagner’s work: its cyclical form and theme. Woolf has received less, though nonetheless significant, attention, and there are some writers on Wagner’s influence who consider Woolf and Joyce. The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake, are all, first, cyclical works: they portray sequences of events that, in some sense, return to where they started. The Ring, despite its length, is a tightly constructed drama with an impressive forward momentum, driven by events of heightened significance: the theft of the gold, the curse on the ring and the entry into Valhalla. In contrast to the interludes of The Waves, the Wake indicates its circularity through continual self-reference.
