Since the middle of the 1970s the novel has been the dominant vehicle of development in Slovak literature. Previously, for many, many years verse and the short story had dominated. Full-length social novels were now being written by representatives of the "middle generation" of fiction writers, Ballek, Habaj, Jaroš, Vincent Šikula, and others who had in the 1960s been grouped around the periodical, Mladá tvorba. They bore within them the characteristic traits of 1960s poetics and a 1960s approach to reality, but at the same time they reacted to the changes Slovak society had passed through at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. They reacted to change or discontinuity by a return to the past and thus made links between past ages and the present. They decided to express in fiction their own experience, but to distribute or spread it over a broader base of historical development. They sought out new geographical or historical areas which they could incorporate into the Slovak cultural and social consciousness. They tried to show the fate of the individual within the movement of history without allowing him to be swallowed up by history. Their starting point was the particular and from that they moved to the social, the generally applicable. They worked towards the concepts "nation" or "mother country" via the notion of "home" (domov), a notion which rings insistently in their works.