Marguerite Helmers

Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State

I am currently one of three editors for a new anthology of scholarly essays titled Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State, for which I am also researching and writing a chapter. The full book of eleven new essays draws attention to the ways that Harry Clarke (1888-1931) responded to his commissions and to his public. Contributors analyze works produced at the height of Clarke’s career, considering commercial, artistic, political, and religious exigencies for and responses to his work. The chapters reflect the individuality of the formal content of Clarke’s work, and also highlight themes such as patronage, public reception, advertising, propaganda, war, and memory, in order to place Clarke within a larger political and cultural context. My chapter focuses on Clarke’s illustrations for the post-war poetry anthology The Year’s at the Spring, edited by Lettice D’Oyly Walters and published by George Harrap in 1920.

Marguerite Helmers is Professor of English, emerita, Department of English, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and past UW System Fellow of at the IRH. Her book Harry Clarke’s War: Illustrations for Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914-1918 (Irish Academic Press, 2016) was researched and completed while a fellow at the Institute. Her articles and essays on the First World War have appeared in the journals Eire Ireland and the Journal of War and Culture Studies, as well as several edited books; in addition, she is the editor of the Visual Rhetoric Series at Parlor Press, an independent scholarly publisher. Marguerite is the current chair of the History and Literature Forum of the MLA, past chair of the MLA’s Committee on Information Technology, and past chair of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars. She has held fellowships at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies (UW Milwaukee) and the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin. She Tweets about the First World War and Irish Studies @MHHelmers.