This monograph presents, from the viewpoint of continuum mechanics, an emerging field of irreversible thermodynamics, in which linear irreversible thermodynamics are extended to the nonlinear regime and macroscopic phenomena far removed from equilibrium are studied in a manner consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. The tool to develop this thermodynamic theory of irreversible processes is generalized thermodynamics, which also extends the classical hydrodynamics of Navier, Stokes and Fourier to nonlinear irreversible processes.