Books by Carolyn Williams

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This story captures the insight of a bright, intuitively smart young man who grew up in the low-income housing projects of Southeast Washington, DC, our nations capital city. His name was Jimmy Black Blango, better known as JB. He lived in the Barry Farms Housing projects at the height of a glorified drug market, in the midst of a culture of the celebrated thug life, gang violence, and mob-style crime. Aside from all that, it was a known fact that gangbangers pledged allegiance to serving time in jail. Even JB got caught up in a clean sweep operation on the streets of Washington, DC, and was sent down to Lorton to serve his time. From there, his status on the streets of Washington, DC, was upgraded to include street credits (i.e., the status of lieutenant) for serving a stench at what was once called the most notorious prison on the east coast, the Lorton Correctional Complex. Now that the prison was mandated by federal law to shut down, the criminal element on the outside decided to bring their drug enterprise on the inside. This was an effort to establish networks that reached beyond the district and extended to all points targeted south.Yet due to the pending closure of the Lorton Complex and the greed among thieves, backstabbing gangbangers, cold-blooded killers, malicious cutthroat staffers, and others caused the whole scam to blow up. At the end of the day, a nefarious culmination of unsavory conduct caused many elements of the Lorton Complex to suffer its unfortunate demise.

Exploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater's prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater's aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. Williams discusses the explicit and embedded narratives that play a crucial role in Pater's aesthetic criticism and examines the figures that compose these narratives, including rhetorical tropes, structures of argument such as genealogy, and historical or fictional personae.

Long before the satirical comedy of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were the hottest send-ups of the day's political and cultural obsessions. Gilbert and Sullivan's productions always rose to the level of social commentary, despite being impertinent, absurd, or inane. Some viewers may take them straight, but what looks like sexism or stereotype was actually a clever strategy of critique. Parody was a powerful weapon in the culture wars of late-nineteenth-century England, and with defiantly in-your-face sophistication, Gilbert and Sullivan proved that popular culture can be intellectually as well as politically challenging.Carolyn Williams underscores Gilbert and Sullivan's creative and acute understanding of cultural formations. Her unique perspective shows how anxiety drives the troubled mind in the Lord Chancellor's "e;Nightmare Song"e; in Iolanthe and is vividly realized in the sexual and economic phrasing of the song's patter lyrics. The modern body appears automated and performative in the "e;Junction Song"e; in Thespis, anticipating Charlie Chaplin's factory worker in Modern Times. Williams also illuminates the use of magic in The Sorcerer, the parody of nautical melodrama in H.M.S. Pinafore, the ridicule of Victorian aesthetic and idyllic poetry in Patience, the autoethnography of The Mikado, the role of gender in Trial by Jury, and the theme of illegitimacy in The Pirates of Penzance. With her provocative reinterpretation of these artists and their work, Williams recasts our understanding of creativity in the late nineteenth century.