The story of the little girl reading the Britannica in her Bronx housing project is a perfect example of America's most treasured narrative of success, treasured, precisely because, for many people, it was true.
"An aspect of the work, overt or not, is the narrative of the treasure hunt through closets, attics, basements and hidden nooks," Dion says.
Persian prose contains a treasure of narratives.
Is the promise of one of the nation's most treasured narratives nothing but a fantasy?
As with the forthcoming film, Ubisoft's Adventures of Tintin, combines three of the original stories – The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure – into one narrative.
But, as ever, it has much to recommend it: some top verbal curlicues, handed to George Clooney, who's clearly having a ball; a very relaxed and highly unpredictable narrative; and, not least, a treasure trove of cherishable 30s "old-timey music" (blues, gospel and bluegrass) put together with loving care by T-Bone Burnett. T-Bone Burnett
Jonathan Rosenbaum of Chicago Reader called the film a "treasure chest of narrative fragments" which "lacks the itinerary and 'instructions for use' that automatically comes with a linear story".
Scene by scene, "Treasure Island" loses its narrative continuity as it turns into an increasingly strident, finger-pointing essay.
While the public function of the storytellers may have disappeared from most countries of the Arabic-speaking world, the collections of tales that they performed remain as a remarkable treasure trove of world narrative.
The Italian art house publishing group Log607 is testing conventional wisdom that guidebooks should be fact-based with a series of fictional-narrative guides that force tourists to go on treasure hunts.
