Eh, I think that just reflects the traditional western tendency of heavily western-centric literary and cultural awareness, more than individual differences in erudition. (I certainly haven’t read all those books myself.)
I bet the average English-fluent college-educated person in South or Southeast Asia, for example, has at least heard of all those epics (except maybe Sundiata and the Popol Vuh). Because their English-medium education (and colonial history, modern global pop culture, etc.) delivers awareness of the traditional western epics, and their own non-western cultural heritage incorporates (most of) the others.
Okay, but (per my earlier post) do you think this (the emphasis in education of one’s dominant culture) is more true of western education and culture than it is of, say, Chinese or South Asian? Sometimes I wonder if we who comprise western culture don’t bash ourselves more than is warranted on topics like this.
In this post-colonial world, I think yeah, absolutely. I don’t think it’s an effect naturally intrinsic to any one culture or anything. It’s just the outcome of the politically dominant regional culture in early modern globalization happening to be western, and that carrying on through industrialization and modern mass media.
I don’t think westerners are any more naturally chauvinistic about their culture(s), or naturally more incurious about other cultures, than East Asians or South Asians, say. But the global-dominance thing meant that westerners didn’t have to absorb knowledge of other cultures to anything like the same extent that other people had to absorb western culture.
I mean, Indian educators, for example, were not over in western Europe revising standard curricula on a grand scale and deciding that all British schoolchildren should study the Ramayana and so on. That sort of differential experience has knock-on effects when it comes to long-term inter-cultural awareness.