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In his Treatise of Human Nature, the eighteenth-century British skeptic David Hume writes that he is "ready to reject all belief and reasoning." He opines no "opinion" of his day is "more probable or likely than another." His enlightenment skepticism conceives the birth of modern nihilism, an event that redefines intellectual poetry and prose. Most notably, Lord Byron's verse masterpiece, Don Juan, fulfills Hume's discovery and creation of skeptical nihilism. Don Juan is the world's first instance of mature, unmitigated nihilism. In this work that reverberates with Hume's violent doubt, Byron insists that each "philosophy" or "system eats another up." He avows that he "know (s) nought" and "admit (s) " naught. Like the neoclassical thinker Hume, the romantic bard Byron pushes skepticism over the edge. In many poems and in Don Juan especially, Byron's chaotic doubt challenges and disables a wide array of major belier-systems or ideologies. This philosophical subversion is nihilism: the destabilization of all traditional morals and beliefs, with the implication that no universal or objective basis is knowable by which any "system" can be ultimately justified and privileged. In Don Juan, then, Byron voices in order to subvert seven ideologies central to the Western tradition: Roman Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, sentimentalism, liberalism, rationalism, heroics or chivalry, and materialism or naturalism. Although naturalism predominates in numerous episodes of Don Juan, at times even this "system" is undercut or "eaten up" by opposing ideologies like Christianity and liberalism. Likewise, in other episodes, Christianity, liberalism, heroics, sentimentalism or rationalism is "consumed" by naturalism. Consequently, Byron's contradictory themes of naturalism, liberalism, and so on do devour each other in a kind of intellectual cannibalism that delights in conflict and opposition. Most controversially, in Don Juan, Byron's governing tropes of feminine sexua

Often a piece of scholarly literature is intriguing not because it is completely right but because it is somewhat wrongheaded. Such is the case with H. David Brumble's historical survey of American Indian autobiography. This is not to imply that Brumble errs in the details of his short history of Indian autobiography. Nor is it to say that he misconceives most of his generalizations on the subject. As an Indian or part Indian myself, I am repeatedly chastened by the formidable expertise displayed by non-Indians like Brumble who write on Native American culture. The argument of Brumble's informative book is that, in its brief recorded history, American Indian autobiography recapitulates "the history of Western [or European] autobiography" (5). Indeed, this is a fascinating idea, but, as Brumble develops it, he beclouds his thesis with issues that betray his Romantic assumptions about Indian storytelling and art.