ABSTRACT
The 'discovery' of America by Robert Southey's twelfth-century Welsh hero is a seminal moment in Madoc. William Wordsworth shows in 'Ruth' how such visions as Southey's are literary creations, constructed by selecting and processing the raw materials of travel accounts to create an aesthetic. Wordsworth portrays America as a heady, exotic land that has disfigured the youth's 'moral frame' and now has ruined Ruth's life with its seductive foreign images. However, like Pantisocracy, Madoc's emigratory design becomes more ambitious as he returns to Wales to swell the community's numbers. Southey's preoccupation with controlling the 'foreign' is extended to the indigenous inhabitants as well as their land. Madoc's colonisation preserves the Welsh way of life in a new land, but leads to the eradication of the Aztec barbarian culture. When Wordsworth describes America in 'Ruth', he overturns Southey's conventional picture of eighteenth-century colonial politics, reversing Madoc's attempt at 'cultural imperialism'.
