Literary critic and Shakespearean scholar who championed the radical potential of both high art and popular culture
Terence Hawkes, who has died aged 81, did much to transform the study of literature in Britain. Until the late 1970s, the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and their followers were widely dismissed as abstruse jargon. Through his editorship of the New Accents series of books and Textual Practice, Britain's first journal of literary theory, Hawkes enabled British students to encounter, and even to understand, the body of work that has become collectively known as "postmodernism". He also produced several strikingly original books on Shakespeare and literary criticism.
Through his efforts to introduce continental ideas to British universities, feminism received a fresh impetus, Marxists found new ways of reading and previously neglected minority-group authors were included in courses. In speaking of "constructing a narrative" or "achieving closure", we are, often unwittingly, using terms and concepts derived from literary theory. Hawkes's own theoretical orientation was laid out in works such as Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), Meaning by Shakespeare (1992) and Shakespeare in the Present (2002).
Born in Birmingham, Hawkes was the son of Constance Hegenbathe, a professional singer, and her husband Frederick Hawkes, a publican, and went to Handsworth grammar school. While a student at University College, Cardiff, he joined Acker Bilk's jazz band as a drummer, and later played with Scott Hamilton and Warren Vaché. At one point, his own band entertained passengers on the paddle steamers travelling between Cardiff and Weston-super-Mare. But after graduating in 1955, Hawkes received an offer to teach at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In America he was delighted to find his Birmingham accent was regarded as eminently desirable – it also allowed him to gently rib fellow Shakespeareans that he sounded more like the bard than they did.
However, on returning to teach at Cardiff in 1959, Hawkes had to deal with a considerable degree of snobbery. He was left in no doubt about the role played by culture, and literature in particular, in bolstering class hierarchy. Throughout his career he championed the radical, oppositional potential of both high art and popular culture. His first books stressed Shakespeare's place in the popular tradition and, to the outrage of many, drew startling but convincing parallels between Renaissance drama and jazz music. The title of his essay collection, That Shakespeherian Rag (1986), encapsulated such links, and Hawkes remained a prominent figure on the Cardiff jazz scene, often sitting in as a session drummer of choice with greats such as Benny Waters and Wild Bill Davidson in the 1980s and 90s.
This sense of performance carried over into the lecture hall. He always succeeded in creating an atmosphere of high drama, which he punctuated with a verbal wit guaranteed to convulse any audience. Above all, he convinced his listeners that what he said actually mattered – that the way we read texts has an immediate, palpable effect on our characters and daily lives – and he was able to do this because he believed it to be true. From the 1980s on, he made Cardiff into a powerhouse of English studies, and was intensely proud of his adopted city and nation.
In Shakespeare in the Present and the edited collection Presentist Shakespeares (2006), he elaborated an original approach that has become known as "presentism". He argued that any reading of a historical text was shaped by the reader's experience in the present, and that rather than try to eliminate such influences, we ought to embrace them. Whether or not critics agreed with this premise, they could not help but acknowledge the brilliance of pieces such as Shakespeare and the General Strike (from Meaning by Shakespeare), which demonstrated that our interpretations of literature could never be apolitical. The acceptance in British academic life that literature is inevitably political, that decisions about what counts as literature are always influenced by social hierarchies, and that the ways we read literature have political effects owe much to Hawkes's influence.
He is survived by his wife, Ann, whom he married in 1961 and to whom his books were always dedicated, along with two sons and three grandsons.
• Terence Frederick Hawkes, literary critic and theorist, born 13 May 1932; died 16 January 2014