While this essay has already examined the tradition of linked short stories as novels and Faulkner's modifications in that tradition, the subject matter of The Unvanquished itself is part of a series of literary precedents about the South. One of the reasons why one of the aims of the novel is historical fiction is in some ways to revise myths of the Southern past much as Mark Twain did in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; see separate entry).

Faulkner shows the myths of the Lost Cause beginning to develop in the war itself especially through the women in the novel such as Drusilla's mother, Aunt Louisa, Mrs. Habersham, and Mrs. Compson, who force Drusilla into marrying John Sartoris. In a letter to Granny, whom Aunt Louisa does not know has been killed, Aunt Louisa sees her husband having "laid down his life to protect a heritage of...