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Editors:
Dr Angus McFadzean (Oxford University Department of Continuing Education) and Dr Pedro Lauria (Universidade Federal Fluminense – UFF, Brazil)

We invite chapters/articles for an edited academic volume on The Amblin Legacy: Coming of Age since the 1980s, with particular attention to how these films were received across different national film and television markets. We welcome proposals from academics and independent scholars. We are especially interested in contributions on reception and production contexts in Asia, Africa, Oceania, Continental Europe, Canada, and Hispanic America.

This call embraces the ecosystem of 1980s youth coming-of-age stories in film, TV and other medias —including comedies, dramas, hybrids with science fiction/fantasy/horror, and school- or neighborhood-centered narratives. These texts often stage pre-teen and teen protagonists confronting family, friendship, class, race, gender and sexuality as they navigate late-twentieth-century neoliberal cultures and the institutions that shape them (home, school, suburb/city, workplace, church, mall).

Illustrative examples: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Gremlins (1984), The Karate Kid (1984), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Goonies (1985), Back to the Future (1985), Explorers (1985), Stand by Me (1986), Heathers (1988), Home Alone (1990) and TV titles such as Goosebumps (1995-1998) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and nostalgic revivals like Stranger Things (2016–) and the Fear Street series.

The collection aims to expand understanding of the global life of these texts by focusing on their circulation, mediation, and afterlives in diverse markets. Each contributor will focus on a specific production and address distinct aspects of reception, translation, adaptation, policy, local production.

Possible Topics (including but not limited to)

• Release patterns and delays (e.g., “receiving the ’80s in the ’90s”) and their effect on how the cycle was understood locally.
• Television presence (broadcast, cable, programming blocks) and intersections with other formats (telenovelas, soap operas, cartoons), forming local youth media ecologies.
• Editing and censorship; ratings and classifications.
• Dubbing, subtitling, translation and mistranslation of slang, youth idioms, jokes, profanity, and culture-specific references.
• Home video vs. theatrical exhibition; rental cultures, piracy, and video-club networks.
• Marketing, posters, trailers, and repackaging; soundtrack and pop-music tie-ins (MTV, radio, record labels).
• Reviews and critical discourse; generic labeling and clustering across markets (e.g., “teen pics,” “adolescent dramas,” “family films”).
• Box-office performance and TV ratings in international markets versus domestic U.S./U.K. performance.
• Iconography and space: school corridors, malls, bedrooms, cul-de-sacs, playgrounds—compared with local urban/suburban/rural realities.
• Sociopolitical contexts: Cold War, austerity, transitions to democracy, cultural imperialism, American hegemony, local moral panics around youth culture, video nasties, etc.
• Thematics: childhood/adolescence, gender, race, sexuality, class, patriarchy, religion, disability, migration, delinquency, and labor.
• Imitations, remakes, unofficial versions in domestic markets (e.g., local riffs on E.T., The Karate Kid, etc), including transpositions to local schools, neighborhoods, and youth subcultures.
• Success/failure of domestic variants and their industrial conditions.
• Reception of 2010s–2020s revivals of 1980s coming-of-age aesthetics (e.g., Stranger Things) and their local inflections.
• Contemporary homages and echoes (e.g., Death of Nintendo (Philippines, 2020), tributes to Stand by Me and similar).

Submissions

To express interest or ask about potential topics not listed above, please contact the editors at suburbanfantasticcfp@gmail.com.

Please submit a 300–500 word abstract (Word document, not PDF) including a brief bio (in the same file), current position and relevant experience, affiliation (if any), and complete contact information to editors Angus McFadzean and Pedro Lauria by November 30 2025.

Full chapters of 6,000–8,000 words (including notes and references) are likely due June 2026 . A publisher has shown preliminary interest. Proposals should be for new essays (no reprints).

Please circulate this announcement to colleagues and networks who may be interested. Proposals from academics and independent scholars in relevant fields are welcome.

Note: Acceptance of a proposed abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the full chapter.

Contact Information

Dr Angus McFadzean is a lecturer specialising in British and American Literature and Film. He is the Program Director of the Oxford University Summer School for Adults and teaches on international programmes for the Department for Continuing Education. He is the editor of Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce: A Critical Edition (University of Florida Press, 2024) and the author of Suburban Fantastic Cinema: Growing Up in the Late Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2019). He holds a doctorate from Wadham College, Oxford, on James Joyce and the aesthetics of transgression. He has published on James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon and Hollywood cinema and has taught widely on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, especially Conrad, Woolf, Joyce and Yeats.

Dr Pedro Artur Baptista Lauria is a Brazilian scholar in Cinema and Audiovisual at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), MA in Communication and Culture at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Geographer from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). He is adjunct professor of “Theory and Practice of Narratives” and “Screenwriting” at UFF, editor-in-chief at Observatório de Cinema e Audiovisual da UFF (OCA-UFF), and director at the social preparatory school PECEP in Rio de Janeiro. Author of the book “O Subúrbio e o Suburbanismo Fantástico Hollywoodiano” (The Suburbs and Hollywood’s Suburban Fantastic). His interests include genre and narrative studies, 1980s youth cinema, suburban fantastic cinema, American fiction and culture.

Contact Email:gusmcf@yahoo.co.uk ; pedrolauria@id.uff.br