English literary theorist and cultural critic whose career — more than fifty books across sixty years, written from an Irish-Catholic-working-class background into and against the English academic mainstream — has been the most consistently readable popularisation of Marxist criticism in English. Born in Salford in 1943 to a Catholic family of Irish descent, he went up to Cambridge in the early 1960s and found his teacher in Raymond Williams, whose student, collaborator, and eventual critical inheritor he became; he spent most of his teaching life at Oxford (as Thomas Warton Professor of English), then at Manchester, Lancaster, Notre Dame, and Limerick. He is that unusual intellectual animal — a serious Marxist who is also a serious Christian (or at least takes Christianity seriously as a body of thought rather than an embarrassment), and the combination gives his later work an edge the straightforwardly secular left often lacks.
His early academic books — Criticism and Ideology (1976), Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981) — brought Althusserian categories to British literary analysis, sometimes in Williams's company, sometimes against him. But his real breakthrough was Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), a wittily lucid survey of the theory boom — phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism — that sold something like three-quarters of a million copies and became, for a generation of anglophone students, the book that explained why literature departments had suddenly become so strange. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) is the ambitious counterpart — a genealogy of the modern aesthetic category from Baumgarten to Adorno, read as a displaced history of the bourgeois subject.
From the mid-1990s he turned increasingly toward direct engagement with religion, liberalism, and the anglophone "New Atheists" (Dawkins, Hitchens), whom he read — in Reason, Faith, and Revolution (2009) and Culture and the Death of God (2014) — as having mistaken a shallow Sunday-school Christianity for Christian theology proper, and having thereby missed the fact that the interesting question is not whether God exists but what a culture without a serious account of ultimate value becomes. Why Marx Was Right (2011), written for the same general reader as Literary Theory, works through the standard anti-Marxist objections one by one. Critics complain that he repeats himself and that his prose has become a steady delivery system for good jokes; admirers point out that almost no other senior literary academic is still writing for non-specialists at all. He is the longest-running line from the British New Left of 1960 into the 21st century.