Since his first novel, Besøget (The Visit, 1963), Svend Åge Madsen has become one of Denmark's most prolific and productive authors. From his initially experimental style of writing, which dissolved the novel genre's traditional comforting sense of identity, time, and space, to his introduction of actual, recognizable locales and more-psychologically developed protagonists, Madsen's authorship has been characterized by a conscious philosophical mode of experimentation in which his focus is on the writing process itself as the mediator of identity.

This evolution within his authorship--from his early modernistic experiments populated by protagonists almost void of personality toward the embedding of characters into a social context--has been mirrored by the general public's increasing interest in Madsen's writing. Practically every book since Jakkels vandring (Jakkel's Journey, 1974) has gone into a third edition; his largest work, Tugt og utugt i mellemtiden (1976; translated as Virtue and Vice in the Middle Time...