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Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself. I want to further argue that the reworking of omniscience in contemporary fiction can be understood as one way in which authors have responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last two decades. I want to suggest that the contemporary revival of omniscience in fact represents a further development and refinement of some of the technical experiments of postmodern fiction. We are accustomed to an historical trajectory of the novel which holds that modernist and postmodernist fiction throughout the twentieth century can be characterised, in part, as a rejection of the moral and epistemological certainties of omniscient narration.

I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fiction: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly redundant omniscient narrator. The essay will draw attention to new modes of omniscient narration being developed in contemporary fiction which complicate this approach to the teaching of narrative voice. This approach, in the guise of 'practical advice', perpetuates a modernist aesthetic prejudice for impersonal modes of narration.

As a case study, the essay analyses the way in which handbooks produced by teachers of Creative Writing adopt a 'pros' and 'con's' approach to the use of narrative voice. The essay argues that a diachronic approach to the teaching of craft will enable formal elements of fiction to be used as heuristic devices for historicising writing samples, thus opening up possibilities for refining and adapting these elements to the concerns of contemporary writers.

Illustrative samples of writing are thus understood synchronically, disavowing the historical contingency and mutabiltity of formal categories. This essay argues that Creative Writing pedagogy relies upon a dehistoricised approach to the notion of 'craft' in which the formal elements of fiction, such as voice and point of view, are conceptualised as static and unchanging 'building blocks' for writers.