This chapter offers a survey of the main approaches that have developed historically in the study of subcultures, picking out pertinent aspects related to the field of literary analysis. It looks particularly at the different approaches adopted in the recognized fields within the development of subcultural studies in the Chicago and Birmingham Schools highlighting several theories that resonate with a literary approach. It then discusses the development of postmodern approaches to the field associated with the Manchester School in the 1990s. The focus on Manchester leads into a discussion of the range of post-subcultural theories that begin to develop in the early-twenty-first century that continue to interrogate and challenge some of the approaches adopted in the classic period represented by the Birmingham and Chicago schools. It concludes by addressing the ways in which more recent critics have attempted a rapprochement between aspects of that classic period with some of the approaches associated with the post-subcultural turn.