Corpul invalid în modernismul periferic: Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, între import și autohtonism

This article presents a socio-literary analysis of the “invalid body” as depicted in Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu’s novels Disheveled Virgins (Fecioarele despletite, 1926) and Concert from Bach’s Music (Concert din muzică de Bach, 1927), within the context of the rise of eugenicist ideologies in interwar Romania. By comparing these portrayals of disability with representations of illness in other contemporary European novels, I explore the anachronistic relationship between the peripheral literary space of Romania and the central literary cultures of England and France. The methodology combines disability studies with key theoretical frameworks, including dysmodernism (Davis, 2019) and the concepts of the dys-/disarticulated (Berger, 2014), which are instrumental in understanding the depiction of the disabled body in 20th century European literature. I argue that the scientific discourses serve as a key factor in the social marginalization of the invalid characters in Papadat-Bengescu’s novels, where illness is not portrayed as the result of personal or psychological trauma but rather as a direct consequence of genetic inheritance. Through this analysis, I aim to highlight the terminological and conceptual differences between the literary center and periphery, focusing on the cultural reception of Papadat-Bengescu’s work in Romania and its social and ideological implications within the broader European context.