ABSTRACT
We concluded the last chapter with the image of proliferating bastards and hybrids, whose identity as “illegitimates” was explored in earlier chapters as an essential legal fi ction. Here, I propose more directly that lineage itself is an essential cognitive fi ction. This chapter, engaged with a single canonical literary text, approaches the conceptual complex of heredity in ways very different from the preceding pages of this book. This kind of disciplinary and discursive shift is necessary-if initially somewhat jarring-in order to follow the full Gordion tangle of possibilities provoked by the heredity problem at the beginning of what we now call the modern era.
